Photos were posted to a Twitter account on Sunday showing Sunni militants supposedly carrying out the mass execution of Iraqi forces and raising questions about the possibility of a broader sectarian war in Iraq, reports state.

The images were originally posted to a militant website and showed masked militants from the Islamist State of Iraq and al-Sham leading away plain-clothes prisoners at gunpoint.

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In a second image, men wearing the black ISIS bandanas are pointing their guns at a group of men lying face down in a ditch. Yet another photo revealed the same men lying with bloody wounds on their heads.

The captions posted alongside the photographs boasted that 1,700 soldiers had been executed, causing many to point to the incident as only a small example of more widespread violence to come.

The photos were released just as animosity mounts between Sunni extremists and the primarily Shiite government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

If the claim of mass execution proves true, it will be the worst conflict to strike the already war-torn region.

The photographs posted both to the ISIS account and to Twitter haven't shown the concrete death toll nor the identity of the supposed victims.

However, Ahmed Abdullah Al Jibouri, the governor of the province where the mass killing supposedly took place, verified that the ISIS have captured hundreds of Iraqi military personnel and Air Force Academy students and he believes that they have all been executed.

The Salah Al Din province has been the scene of severe conflict recently as government forces attempt to take control of the Sunni-dominated city of Tikrit from ISIS militants.

U.S. State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki pointed to the need for Iraq's leaders to unite in order to fight back the growing threat posed by militant groups such as the ISIS. 

TagsISIS, militants, mass, execution, iraqi forces