Islamic State has recreated The Handmaid’s Tale

Well, don’t think there’s much milage in the charge against Peter Kosminsky’s drama about IS, The State,  that it glamorises that outfit, do you? It was about as grisly a depiction of the horrors of IS as is commensurate with British viewing standards.

So, in this account of four British recruits to IS broadcast this week, we didn’t get the rape of Yazidi women and their nine-year-old daughters but we got the slave market where the jihadists bought and sold them – there’s a secondary market, by the way, in these women in the Middle East. We didn’t get homosexuals tossed off the top of tall buildings, but we did get a local fearing his life lest it happen to him. We didn’t see the decapitation of suspected spies and traitors, but we did see young boys playing football with a severed head. And the brutalisation of young boys (some of those enslaved Yazidis are among their number) is hinted at rather than spelled out – but the charmers of IS have used boys to hunt down and kill captives in a grisly game of hide and seek.