The Power and the Gore

"Starting with a 13-year-old boy, they lined up the sons according to their height and beheaded them in that order. Afterwards, they hung the boys' heads on the door of the school the family had been hiding in."
"They kidnap and carry out assassinations."
"They think nothing of bringing down a whole building with women and children inside, just to kill one person."
"ISIL [ISIS] blew up Jamal's house, killing one of his brothers. They kidnapped another brother and killed him too. After that Jamal disappeared."
"There are of course some who really believe that killing and whipping is the correct way to spread Islam. But for Jamal, he doesn't really care if the mission spreads Islam. All he cares about is becoming more powerful. Now, if a stronger organization emerges, he will join it. And there are lots of men in ISIL just like him."
Abu Abdullah, defector from ISIS

Before joining ISIS Saddam Jamal had been a drug dealer and a commander in the FSA 

There is nothing really startlingly new in the descriptions of atrocities committed by Islamic State jihadists, as told by a defector of the Islamic State, in speaking of the Islamic State commander Saddam Jamal. That Jamal does not wholeheartedly engage in slaughter in fully committing himself passionately to fundamentalist Islam in the process, justifying his fanatical crimes against humanity, is hardly ground-breaking news.

Virulent Islamism becomes a cover for many who simply take part in jihad because to commit such crimes and to gain popular esteem through the celebrity of their brutality and in the process derive riches from oil-wealthy Sunnis in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, happy to fund the extremist brutality actually represents just another reality.There are no crimes too unspeakable for Islamic State jihadists to commit to. Their hateful pathology is one of freedom to do as they will.

Acting in the name of their god, they assume all the life-and-death attributes of an all-powerful deity.

But that reality appears to have been too bestial in its nihilistic blood-letting for a paltry few of the Islamic State jihadis who viewed the atrocities with eventual revulsion, finally feeling they could no longer be part of such excruciatingly evil acts that empowered psychopaths to engage in lunatic slaughter. The defector described his duty as a bodyguard for Saddam Jamal who had risen in the ranks of the Islamic State.

It was not imperious religious ideology of totalitarian viciousness that drew Saddam Jamal, a man involved in pushing drugs in Syria. He had recognized an opportunity to advance himself as a fighter against the regime of Bashar al-Assad, becoming a top commander in the Free Syrian Army. But with the incursion of foreign Islamists and the evolving conflict between the rebels and the Islamists, Jamal pledged allegiance to Islamic State after they had murdered two of his brothers.

To the victor went that spoiled psyche. It took little time before he was leading an Islamic State militia. And he made a fearsome reputation for brutality even among the Islamic State jihadis when he attacked a local tribe, the Shaitat, after they rebelled against the Islamic State. Some 700 Shaitat men and boys were slaughtered in revenge for their uprising. Those children who were beheaded in front of their parents were of that tribe.

The never-ending atrocities appear to have unnerved Abu Abdullah as well as several other bodyguards and they decided to leave ISIS; in the process of which four were killed when it became known what their intentions were. "It would take days to recount to you the violence I witnessed", Abu Abdullah said. But he's doing his best to fill that knowledge gap.

He spoke of the "emir" of the nearby town of Shehil, Abu Abdullah al-Qahtani, who guided his eight-year-old son in slitting the throat of a prisoner. "He held his son's hand with a knife in it and made him cut the head of an FSA fighter accused of organising attacks on Isil," he said.