Anti-Assad fighter appears to eat internal organ of dead
government soldier in horrific footage
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Photograph: Yazan Homsy/Reuters
Free Syrian Army fighters in Homs, cradle of the Farouq Brigades. |
Horrific video footage of a
Syrian rebel commander eating the heart or lung of a dead government fighter
has aroused furious international controversy, fuelling an already heated
debate over western support for the armed uprising against President Bashar
al-Assad's regime.
The grisly film had been
circulating for several days, attracting extensive comment on social media
networks such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. But in the face of an often
vicious propaganda war between the government and rebels, early doubts about
the film's authenticity faded when the perpetrator, named as Khaled al-Hamad,admitted that he had mutilated the corpse of
an unnamed soldier as an act of revenge.
"We opened his cell
phone and I found a clip of a woman and her two daughters fully naked and he
[the dead soldier] was humiliating them, and sticking a stick here and
there," Hamad told the Time news website.
Human
Rights Watch (HRW), an independent monitor, said: "The
figure in the video cuts the heart and liver out of the body and uses sectarian
language to insult Alawites [Assad's minority sect]. At the end of the video
[the man] is filmed putting the corpse's heart into his mouth, as if he is
taking a bite out of it."
Hamad, also known as Abu Sakkar, said he also had video footage of
himself using a saw to cut a Shabiha government militiaman into "small and
large pieces".
Yasser Taha, a fellow fighter, told the Guardian an unnamed female
relative of Abu Sakkar had been raped and killed by government soldiers. Time
said he had in fact eaten the dead man's lung, not his liver or heart.
The Syrian Opposition Coalition (SOC), the main western and
Arab-backed anti-Assad political grouping, quickly condemned the incident as a
crime and pledged to bring the perpetrator to justice.
Atrocities have been reported since the start of the Syrian
conflict in March 2011, but few images have been as repulsive as this one. Film
of prisoners apparently being buried alive turned out to have been faked, but
other shocking footage proved genuine.
"It is not enough for Syria's
opposition to condemn such behaviour or blame it on violence by the
government," said Nadim Houry of HRW. "The opposition forces need to
act firmly to stop such abuses."
The SOC said: "Such an act contradicts the morals of the
Syrian people as well as the values and principles of the Free Syrian Army. The
FSA has been [fighting] and continues to fight for the dignity of every Syrian
striving for freedom.
"The FSA is a national army above all, formed to defend
civilians and deliver the Syrian people from the mentality of revenge and
crime. It completely rejects the ill-treatment of the wounded and the
disfigurement of the dead."
The video is a blow to faltering western efforts to raise and
mentor a credible opposition force to fight for democracy, in the event that
the Assad regime falls.
International revulsion seems likely to affect discussions in
western capitals about supporting the FSA. Britain and France have been seeking
to amend or drop the EU arms embargo on Syria. The Obama administration has
signalled that it may start openly supplying the rebels but has not done so
yet. The CIA has reportedly been co-ordinating arms deliveries by anti-Assad
Gulf states.
Opposition supporters complained that one savage act was getting
massive global media coverage while the death of an estimated 80,000 people was
being tolerated by the international community.
"This distressing incident is one example of warfare gone
completely askew, but it clearly doesn't represent the Syrian opposition at
large," said Julien Barnes-Dacey of the European Council for Foreign
Relations in London. "It doesn't compare in scale with massacres and
atrocities committed by the Syrian regime. But it does play into fears about
where the conflict is going and whether arming the rebels is the right
approach."
Sakkar was a well-known member of the Farouq Brigades, a unit that
rose from the ruins of the Baba Amr suburb of Homs and became one of the
rebels' best resourced fighting forces.
During the first 18 months of the war, the Farouq Brigades were
seen as a cohesive militia with mainstream leanings, which could credibly fight
under the banner of the FSA. Then and now, the FSA has struggled to assemble a
command-and-control structure to control the large numbers of rebel-aligned
groups, which mostly answer to local leaders.
"It highlights the fact that we are not talking about a
centrally controlled and well-organised rebel force," Barnes-Dacey said.
"These are rebels fighting in distinct areas according to their own needs
and ambitions. Some are driven by a thirst for revenge, criminalisation,
sectarianism … These are the array of forces that have been unleashed in Syria
today."
Farouq became established
in Idlib, where it was backed by Qatar and
at times Saudi Arabia. Late last year, Sakkar formed a splinter group, which he
called the Independent Omar al-Farouq Brigade.
For the last six months this small unit has joined the fray in
Qusayr, which borders Lebanon and is seen as a strategic crossroads by regime
and rebels.
Sakkar's sectarian rhetoric has hardened considerably lately, and
he has often been recorded denouncing Alawites and Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia
militia that is heavily involved in battles near Homs.
Hamad told Time that Syria's revolution started peacefully.
"They [the Alawites] were the ones who killed our children in Baba Amr and
raped our women," he said. Then, referring to the recent massacre of Sunni
villagers in Bayda, near Baniyas – attributed by rebels to the regime – he
added: "They were the ones who slaughtered the children and women in
Bayda. We didn't start it; they started it."
Swearing to avenge every death, he said: "Our slogan is, an
eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth."
Additional reporting by
Mona Mahmood
Video horrors
Shocking videos have emerged regularly from Syria over the last
two years, but these are some that have attracted wide public attention. In
several cases the government and rebels blamed each other for committing
atrocities.
• In Aleppo 68 bodies were discovered in a river in
January 2013. All the victims had been killed by a single gunshot to
the head. Investigations showed that many of the victims were residents of the
Bustan al-Qasr district or other areas under opposition control who disappeared
when they went into government-controlled areas.
• Syrian forces allegedly
buried alive a civilian from al Qusair, Homs in April 2012.Storyful
analysed it and found serious doubts about its authenticity.
BBC experts noted dubious factors including the Alawite accents of those who
appeared in the film.
• Footage from Aleppo showed
Free Syrian Army rebels executing four Assad loyalists in August 2012. Under
pressure from its western supporters the FSA condemned the incident and
promised to investigate and punish the perpetrators.
• Bodies were shown being thrown off a bridge in
Hama in August 2011. CNN said the footage could not be independently
authenticated.