A video smuggled over the Syrian border by a former rebel features a mass execution of government soldiers by the Jund al-Sham group fighting Assad. The latest example of rebel brutality comes as Washington prepares to intervene into the conflict.
The video, obtained by New York Times and which has gone viral
online, is a mobile phone recording of an execution that took
place in April.
Seven government soldiers are shown shirtless on their knees in
somewhat fetal positions with their faces to the ground. Some
have their hands tied behind their backs.
Rebels stand behind the condemned men, pointing their firearms
down at them and listening to their leader chant the verdict.
“For 50 years, they are companions to corruption,” the
commander of the group says. “We swear to the Lord of the
Throne, that this is our oath: We will take revenge.”
Having pronounced that, the man shoots the soldier closest to
him. Other gunmen immediately follow suit to execute the rest of
the captured soldiers. The dead bodies are then dumped into a
well.
The man who smuggled the video across the border is former
assistant to the chief of the group, who says he defected from it
because he could no longer stand atrocities performed by his
brothers in arms, according to New York Times.
The runaway, concealing his identity for security reasons,
explains the seven soldiers were executed after videos of them
raping civilians and looting were found on their cell phones.
The group he belonged to is little-known and not large,
consisting of 300 fighters. It’s called Jund al-Sham, sharing the
name with three international terrorist groups.
The rebel commander is Abdul Samad Issa, 37, also known as ‘the
Uncle’ because two of his deputies are his nephews. According to
his defected assistant the man believes his father was killed
during a 27-day government crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood in
1982, led by the father of Syria’s current president. Thus,
fighting government forces now is partly a matter of personal
revenge for Issa.
The video is one in a series of episodes raising questions over
methods used by the rebel forces, some of which actually claim
links to terrorists.
One of the groups, associating itself with Al-Qaeda attacked a Christian village on Wednesday.
In June, a teenage boy was allegedly executed by an Al-Qaeda-affiliated opposition
group for supposedly blaspheming.
In May, the world was shocked to see a video of a Syrian rebel
apparently eating the heart of a slain government soldier.