Just like the Beatles, they were three at the start. Like the band, they came from the United Kingdom, but from the west suburbs of London rather than Liverpool. And like the Liverpudlians, the John Lennon equivalent died a violent death long before the other three, who remain alive, in detention. The hostages held by the Islamic State group (IS) gave them the nickname "the Beatles" because of their British accents. They earned the reputation of being the jihadist group's harshest jailers during its grim trade of Western hostages in the mid-2010s in Syria, before they executed several of them.

The "Beatles" of IS were frequently mentioned during a trial of the Islamist group's jailers and torturers, held from February 17 to March 21, before the special criminal court in Paris. However, none of the remaining three members of the sinister group testified in court, even remotely. According to most hostages, they were the cruelest guards in the hellish prison system established by the jihadist group for its Arab and Western detainees, whether they were journalists, humanitarian workers, or ordinary Syrian citizens deemed, rightly or wrongly, as enemies of the jihadist cause.

They got into the habit of referring to the hostages with dog names or numbers. They forced them to don orange jumpsuits like those worn by US death row inmates, mimicking the dress code of Guantanamo Bay, the US detention center located in Cuba. Their specialty? A battle royale of forced fights between hostages, where the loser was rewarded with a waterboarding session, their head plunged into a toilet bowl.

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