Abdul Bin Khorne

For a long time I was trying to upload new photos, but DeviantArt was having some "unknown error" message. Looks like I finally had luck to submit it.

Well, reading the Imperial Armor books I had the intense desire to build some renegade militia to help my heretics at war. So I saw in the internet about that ISIS guys collecting "skulls for the skull throne" everywhere around Middle East and decided to make some renegade arab-looking guys, like a heretic side of Tallarn troopers (but not really from the planet Tallarn). 

Behold and despair! The Khornate State of Irem and Sarnath! 
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Abdul is a native man of the High Pillars of Irem, the mystical capital of planet Irem, located in the fringes of the Segmentum Obscurum. As most of his fellow countrymen, he born in a hostile, dry and unforgiving desert, where only the bravest and strongest survives. Son of a wealth tradesman and one of his five hundred wives (he never knew for sure which one), he was raised in a strange aeon of conquest, turmoil and religious zealotry.

Irem was found by the Imperium and taken to compliance by the World Eaters, prior to the Horus Heresy, and at the time the population was constituted by some ten billion humans, descendants of middle eastern colonizers from before the Dark Ages. The planet and it's moon, Sarnath, were an advanced civilization with technology to travel the void, but not to cross the Warp, and their local religion seemed to be a strange crossing of old judeo-christian-islam mysticism with the belief in outworldly monsters from a time before mankind ever existed, in a pantheon preached by an old martyr named Abdul Al Hazred. 

During the Heresy, the local cluster of stars and systems became cut from the rest of the galaxy by warpstorms, so the locals only knew of the fate of their "newly discovered" Imperium after Horus was dead and the Emperor entombed within the Golden Throne. Financially Irem and Sarnath were important for the rebuilding of the Imperium, with large suplies of manpower, fierce guardsmen legions and mineral resources, but the local politics and culture suffered enormously from this exchanges, as Inquisitors ordered purges and suppressed the old beliefs and holy men were taken as "warlocks" to be sacrificed to the distant "Emperor in his Throne".

The Ecclesiarchy never succeded to set foot in the system, with it's clerics "strangely" disappearing soon after they touched solid ground. But as the troops, resources and manpower were flowing steadily, the Administratum "overlooked" the cultural clashes in favor of other more pressing matters, and soon Irem and Sarnath became buried under the bureaucracy, hardly noted and not mentioned at all.

With the loose grip of the Imperium, many religious and political movements and uprisings started to brew in the desert dunes, with mad preachers claiming to be Al Hazred reborn, spreading word about the "Emperor and his Throne" and how they were being obligated by fat and stupid governors to send all their riches away and get nothing in return. 

At the hands of one of this preachers named Abdul Al Hazred, the KSIS started and became the armored fist of some of the most radical cults in the system, the Hazreditt. The Hazreditt clerics claimed to have seem the "Emperor" himself, sit at his throne of human skulls, and received the revelation that his name was Khorne, and only by the taking of skulls and the spilling of blood could his wrath get satiated, preventing him and his minions from unleashing damnation upon the galaxy.

Abdul was amazed by the preaching and awe of this bloody revelations, and abandoned his family to join the KSIS, being tattooed with a white skull at his face, the "Mark of the Righteous". After some training, more at occult knowledge and supernatural visions than in the art of war, he was judged fit for the frontlines.
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So this guy is the first of my KSIS troopers, made with some lots of bits and some parts sculpted by myself. I based his looks at WWII and earlier arab/north african troops, with shemagh, camouflaged robes and desert colors. The "long lasrifle" was based on those absurdly and cartoonish long morrocan blackpowder rifles, with canvas wrapped around the barrel, helping in camouflage during the day and being armed as a tent at night. Also the KSIS troops use to carry meat strips around the barrel, under the canvas, as they cook naturally under the sun or with the rifle heat when firing.