The seven-year-old has a hint of a smile as he lifts a severed head with both hands. The photo of the boy, reported to be the son of the Australian Islamist militant Khaled Sharrouf, was taken in the northeast Syrian city of Raqqa which has been overrun by Islamic State militants. When Mr Sharrouf fled Australia to go to war in Syria, he took four of his children with him.
It is hard to fathom how that seven-year-old will psychologically recover from such a photo op. The Islamic State has published any number of similarly barbaric images on social media in recent months, depicting everything from decapitated heads in a saucepan to lines of captured soldiers ritually paraded and then executed. Forget the obvious vulnerability of a child’s psyche; it is difficult to imagine how any of these IS participants will regain their humanity.
As the United States and its allies become embroiled, again, in Iraq’s tragic bloodletting, a critical fear is that their citizens who travel to Iraq and Syria to join the Islamic State's so-called caliphate will return to their home countries as trained killers with an extremist agenda. Western nations have reason to be concerned. More than 200 Australians have joined the terrorist organisation, and across Europe from Britain to Kosovo, hundreds if not thousands of young men and women have moved to the Middle East and “chosen the right path”, in the words of two teenage Austrian girls who disappeared from Vienna in April.
Events in the Middle East, be it Syria’s catastrophic civil war, Israel's punishment of Gaza or Iraq’s slippage towards disintegration, can seem awfully far away. Unfortunately, we know that these poisons seep in closer to home.
An estimated 200 Indonesians and 30 Malaysians have left Southeast Asia to join the Islamic State, according to a report released last week by the New York-based thinktank Soufan Group. The numbers might be small, and certainly the adherents represent a microscopic extremist segment, but it is obvious that Southeast Asia is also entangled in the same strains of violent obscurantism. The Bali bombings of 2002 and 2005 were only the most notable reminders.
An ideologue of the Southeast Asian terror group Jemaah Islamiyah responsible for those attacks, Abu Bakar Bashir, has professed loyalty to the IS from behind his prison bars in Central Java. The Philippine terrorist-cum-criminal group Abu Sayyaf has done the same. These are high-profile entities but they are most certainly on the lunatic fringe.
Thailand's involvement is tangential at best. There is no evidence of Thais involved in the southern unrest training or fighting abroad. But the country is a transit point and safe haven for criminal extremists. A leader of Jemaah Islamiyah, Riduan Isamuddin, better known as Hambali, was arrested in Ayutthaya in 2003. More broadly speaking, the events of our neighbours greatly affect the welfare of the country.
There is another instructive parallel with Thailand's experience — the suppression of southerners' religious and cultural identity directly feeds into extremism. Some of the best examples of counter-insurgency come from diplomacy, not repression, engaged by our Asean neighbours: in both Indonesia's Aceh and the Philippines' Mindanao, peace pacts have devolved autonomy to the local level in return for the demilitarisation of Islamist rebels (although, admittedly, the Philippines deal with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front is a work in progress).
Those pictures of decapitation and seven-year-old trophy hunters are not just barbarity — they are calculated propaganda meant to provoke a response that furthers the Islamic State's aims.
In Osama bin Laden's "bleed until bankruptcy" plan, he straightforwardly stated that his goal was to embroil the United States in costly foreign wars through provocation. It is part of the folly of the George W Bush administration that it followed his instructions to the letter in Iraq.
The so-called Islamic State in the past few days has murdered civilians and enslaved women and children of Iraq's Yazidi minority. It is a grave threat to the Middle East, and Southeast Asians who support its brutality are as guilty and as dangerous as any.
But it is important to see Islamic State for what it is — it is neither Islamic nor a state. The "caliphate" it claims is nothing like the Islamic states of the Ottoman era and its predecessors. Its fanatics perversely violate the fundamental principles of Islam at every turn. Its adherents are criminals, not to be confused with the vast majority of Muslims in Southeast Asia and elsewhere.