BEIRUT: A video published yesterday showed fighters of the Al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front in Syria executed 11 men they accused of taking part in massacres by President Bashar Al-Assad’s forces. The film is believed to be from eastern Deir al-Zor province and dates from some time in 2012, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition monitoring group. The Observatory’s head, Rami Abdelrahman, said the Nusra Front has recently been releasing several videos of their past operations. He said the man seen executing the prisoners in the video – a Nusra commander – had been killed in March 2013 in battles with local tribes in the province. The footage shows the commander, his face covered in a black balaclava, shooting each prisoner in the back of the head as they kneeled, blindfolded and lined up in a row in the sand. “The sharia court for the eastern region in Deir al-Zor has sentenced to death these apostate soldiers that committed massacres against our brothers and families in Syria,” the executioner said on the video. Islamist militants with black flags shouted “God is great” as each man was shot. The executioner returned to some victims, firing more bullets into them to make sure they were dead.
Videos of executions and torture have become increasingly common in Syria, where more than 94,000 people have been killed in a conflict now in its third year, according to the Britishbased Observatory, which has a network of activists in Syria. Such videos posted online are hard to verify due to government restrictions on access for independent media. The Nusra video is the second video to be published in the past two days showing executions by fighters who say they are from Al- Qaeda-linked groups.
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BEIRUT: A video published yesterday showed fighters of the Al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front in Syria executed 11 men they accused of taking part in massacres by President Bashar Al-Assad’s forces. The film is believed to be from eastern Deir al-Zor province and dates from some time in 2012, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition monitoring group. The Observatory’s head, Rami Abdelrahman, said the Nusra Front has recently been releasing several videos of their past operations. He said the man seen executing the prisoners in the video – a Nusra commander – had been killed in March 2013 in battles with local tribes in the province. The footage shows the commander, his face covered in a black balaclava, shooting each prisoner in the back of the head as they kneeled, blindfolded and lined up in a row in the sand. “The sharia court for the eastern region in Deir al-Zor has sentenced to death these apostate soldiers that committed massacres against our brothers and families in Syria,” the executioner said on the video. Islamist militants with black flags shouted “God is great” as each man was shot. The executioner returned to some victims, firing more bullets into them to make sure they were dead.From The Jerusalem Post:
Israeli sources: Assad’s survival of Syrian strife preferred The scenario that Syrian President Bashar Assad would survive his country’s bloody conflict, yet with reduced power, would be preferred by Israel in contrast to a takeover by rebel factions with Islamic extremist inklings, The Times of London cited an Israeli official as saying Friday.
“Better the devil we know than the demons we can only imagine if Syria falls into chaos and the extremists from across the Arab world gain a foothold there,” one senior Israeli intelligence officer was quoted as saying.
A weakened, but intact Assad regime would be preferable for Syria and the Middle East, the Time reported intelligence sources saying.
