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A daily roundup of terrorism and security issues.

The self-styled Islamic State (IS) beheaded another helpless captive on video, the latest incident of the jihadi outfit's heavy reliance on savage propaganda as a weapon of war.

This time the victim was not an American journalist, but a captured fighter from the peshmerga, the Kurdish military. The beheading further bolsters the Al Qaeda offshoot's reputation for murdering captives -- a reputation that has spread fear within the ranks of the Iraqi military, and helped turn IS's offensive in Iraq's northern Nineveh Province this summer into a raging success.

Neighboring Iraqi Kurdistan and its forces have presented much stiffer resistance. While the Iraqi forces stationed in Nineveh were Shiite Arabs from further south in the country, with little personal stake in defending the Sunni Arab area and demoralized by the corruption of their officer corps, the Kurds are fighting for what they view as their homeland and have nowhere they can or want to run to.

Kurdish Iraqi forces have also received ample foreign support. The US has carried out over 100 airstrikes against IS and in support of Kurdish forces this month. And the US, Britain, France, and Iran have all pledged weapons or other support to the Iraqi Kurds in their fight against the Sunni jihadis of IS. That's the context for the group's latest propaganda video, clearly designed to build on IS's reputation for bloodthirstiness. AFP reports:

Placing captives in orange jumpsuits was also popular with the group's predecessor, Al Qaeda in Iraq. It's a reference to the orange jumpsuits that prisoners were forced to wear at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba and in US prison camps like Abu Ghraib inside Iraq during the US occupation. Pictures of US forces torturing prisoners in Abu Ghraib early in the US war helped feed Sunni Arab outrage which in turn fed the insurgency. Many of the leaders of IS, be they former Iraqi army officers or members of the jihadi insurgency, spent time in such camps during the US-led war in the country between 2003-2011.

Stepping up the propaganda

Videotaped atrocities in an attempt to spread fear are nothing new for the group, but it appears to be stepping up the propaganda effort as world powers, particularly the US, move toward getting more involved in halting the group's spread. Yesterday the group boasted on video about the mass murder of captured Syrian government soldiers in the Syrian province of Raqaa. At least 160 captives were murdered in that case.

The group's use of videotaped murders as both a weapon of terror and a recruiting tool among the minority of the world's Muslims attracted to its methods and messages has sparked a debate over whether social media sites like Twitter and Facebook should do more to block access for the militant group's social media team.

As Elizabeth Dickinson wrote for º£½Ç´óÉñ after the murder of American journalist James Foley earlier this month:

While IS propaganda may have helped the group tactically in parts of Iraq and Syria, the growing awareness of the group's willingness to murder all who oppose them may be doing them strategic harm. President Obama gave a press conference yesterday that devoted a substantial amount of time to tackling the group. While he said the US is still working out a strategy, Obama hinted at more military support for Iraq if it can build a government that includes voices from the country's Sunni Arab minority, something the country's leaders from the Shiite Arab majority have consistently refused to do over the past decade.

Cooperation?

Obama also said: "I'm encouraged so far that countries in the region, countries that don't always agree on many things, increasingly recognize the primacy of the threat that ISIL poses to all of them."

But what he didn't mention was that Iran, under US sanctions over its weapons program, is also becoming more prominent in facing the group. The reality that US military efforts to help the Iraqi government and the Kurds against IS will inevitably involve some form of coordination with Iranian forces is a major complication.

On Tuesday, Iraqi Kurdish Regional Government President Massoud Barzani hosted Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in the Kurdish capital of Erbil and thanked the Islamic Republic effusively for its support. "We asked for weapons and Iran was the first country to provide us with weapons and ammunition," Mr. Barzani told reporters. Mr. Zarif, for his part, said: "We have no military presence in Iraq. We do have military cooperation with both the central government and the Kurds in different arenas."

One piece of good news is that while foreign fighters have flooded to the side of IS, much as they did to the side of Al Qaeda in Iraq at the start of the last decade, the numbers by most estimates are still small. There's been a great deal of alarm at the presence of Europeans and Americans in IS ranks: Two troubled American converts to Islam were reported to have died fighting for the group in Syria this month, and earlier this summer a young American carried out a suicide bombing for the group in the country. But, the Westerners are generally treated as cannon fodder by the group, since they came without military skills and with the suspicion they could be penetration agents. And a chart compiled by the Economist shows that in percentage terms, the number of foreigners of all stripes willing to kill and die for the group is very small.

Foreign fighters in Syria, per population. Jordan on top. Belgium leads Europeans - pic.twitter.com/zFJR6jbpKy via @TheEconomist @shashj

— Koert Debeuf (@koertdebeuf) August 28, 2014

Roughly 300 fighters from Jordan is in some way alarming, though not surprising. Many Jordanians joined Al Qaeda in Iraq – its founding leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was Jordanian – but then as now it was a tiny fraction of the country's population. The estimated number of Jordanian's fighting for IS amount to 0.03 percent of the country's people.