BEIRUT, Lebanon — Propagandists for the Islamic State released a video on Tuesday showing the group’s fighters incinerating, drowning and blowing up men accused of helping the United States and American allies bomb its bases.

The video was one of the Islamic State’s most gruesome and appeared to suggest internal concern that civilians living in areas under the group’s control could be actively working against it.

The propagandists included a personal message in the video intended for a lieutenant in the Iraqi police force, Bassem Mohammed, who has been struggling for months to obtain salaries and arms for a group of former policemen wanting to fight the Islamic State jihadists in Nineveh Province. Mosul, Nineveh’s provincial capital, is the largest city controlled by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

In a telephone call from northern Iraq on Tuesday, Lieutenant Mohammed said that he knew about half of the 16 prisoners seen being killed in the video and that he was related to many of them.

“It was my father, my cousin, my uncle and others,” he said, adding that they had lived in Islamic State territory but had not acted against it.

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“They are civilians, without exception,” he said. “If someone is not a civilian, he can’t live in their areas.”

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The naming of Lieutenant Mohammed in the video and the killing of his relatives highlighted how the Islamic State works locally to undermine the morale of its enemies.

The video opens with scenes of fighters from the Islamic State pulling the remains of dead civilians from piles of rubble, while a narrator curses the United States-led coalition that is bombing the group in Syria and Iraq and the spies who help the coalition.

Then a series of prisoners dressed in red jumpsuits say they were recruited by Lieutenant Mohammed and others to spy on Islamic State fighters, to form groups to kill Islamic State leaders and to film its bases.

Interspersed are scenes depicting the execution of the prisoners. One group is locked in a car that is set afire. They burned to death. Others are locked in a cage lowered into a swimming pool. They drowned. The final group, which included Lieutenant Mohammed’s father, were killed after explosives placed on them were detonated.

“It is the group’s most savage video to date,” said Hassan Hassan, co-author of the book “ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror.” “A lot of thinking went into it.”

While the video was particularly graphic, Mr. Hassan said public executions were common in areas under Islamic State control.

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ISIS carries out brutal executions in a regular way as a constant reminder to local populations and to deter people from cooperating with its enemies,” he said.

In an interview in northern Iraq late last year, Lieutenant Mohammed said he had joined the Iraqi police force after the American-led invasion in 2003 and worked in a tactical unit that had been trained by American special forces to fight Al Qaeda.

He showed photos on his iPad of his unit in their gear, posing with American soldiers, as well as certificates he had received for completing training programs financed by the United States government.

All that stopped after the United States withdrew from Iraq in 2011 and his unit was put under the local governor, who he said liked to call out the SWAT team for show when he had important meetings but gave them little support for real police work.

When Islamic State fighters stormed Mosul a year ago, Lieutenant Mohammed fled for the Kurdish-controlled region in northern Iraq, where he and others from the province’s police force founded a camp to gather their men in the hope that someone would arm them to fight the group.

Many of his relatives chose to stay in areas taken over by the Islamic State instead of living as displaced persons elsewhere.

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About a month ago, the Islamic State arrested one of the men seen in the video, who had been in touch with Lieutenant Mohammed, and apparently used him to find the others.

“Anyone who had Bassem’s number, anyone who had talked to him, they would take away,” said a close relative of Lieutenant Mohammed’s, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of angering his relatives.

“They were not giving any information,” the relative said. “It was all because they were related to him.”

In one of the video’s last scenes, a captive addresses Lieutenant Mohammed directly. “Nothing you do will work, and all you are doing is harming civilians,” the captive says. “The Islamic State is fighting 60 countries, and you came to fight the Islamic State?”

The jihadists were said to have suffered a setback in Syria on Tuesday, when Kurdish fighters and Arab rebels seized an ISIS-held army base and village, Ein Essa, between the Turkish border and Raqqa, the largest ISIS-controlled city in Syria.

That advance, reported by the Kurdish fighters and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group, came after the seizure by Kurdish fighters and Arab rebels last week of the Syrian town of Tal Abyad on the Turkish border, a strategic area that the Islamic State has long used to smuggle fighters and supplies.

The seizure of Ein Eissa by Kurdish-led forces put them about 30 miles from Raqqa, but Kurdish leaders have said they have no plans to attack the city.

Also on Tuesday, United Nations investigators condemned Syria’s government and opposition armed groups for deliberately targeting civilians.

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