Video is confirmed to be real, disgusting. Toronto Star
Cutting open the chest of a dead soldier in uniform, the rebel lifts out the heart and rips off a chunk of the bleeding organ with his teeth, vowing to do the same to every soldier fighting for Syrian President Bashar Assad.
The 30-second video, some of the most horrifying footage to emerge from Syria’s battlefield, has gone viral on the Internet, underlining a sense that the civil war is out of control, with no lines too savage to cross.
But who is Abu Sakkar, the lightly bearded man in the video spewing sectarian hatred?
“Our slogan is an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” he defiantly told Time magazine on Tuesday after Human Rights Watch released a report validating the video and condemning it as a war crime. “Hopefully we will slaughter all of them (Alawites, the minority group that includes Assad’s family).”
What makes the cannibalistic act even more worrying is that Abu Sakkar is not a minor figure. His real name is Khalid al-Hamad, a Sunni commander from the besieged district of Baba Amr in Homs who helped found the Al Farouq Brigade, a mainstream rebel group that fought to liberate the city from the regime. Homs suffered a sustained and devastating siege for months — Baba Amr was particularly brutalized — before the government recaptured it in March 2012.
Abu Sakkar broke away from the rebel group last October and founded a more radical faction, the Independent Al Farouq Brigade, said Nadim Houry, the Middle East deputy director at Human Rights Watch. The mutilation is an indication of how badly the war is going, Houry told the Star from Beirut.
“Certain areas, particularly around Homs, have become increasingly sectarian and it is a conflict that for each side is seen as existential, and so is this idea that all means are justified,” he said.
Human Rights Watch reported that Abu Sakkar is fighting in Qasayr, a town near the Lebanese border that has become a strategic battleground because it is a rebel pipeline for weapons and soldiers. For Assad, disrupting the pipeline is important.
The desecration of the corpse happened on March 26 in Qasayr, Houry said.
Al-Hamad told Time magazine that he cut out the soldier’s organs after finding footage on the man’s cellphone that showed him sexually assaulting a naked woman and her two daughters. He justified his actions by saying the brutality of the government had driven him to it.
“You are not seeing what we are seeing and you are not living what we are living,” he said. “Where are my brothers, my friends, the girls of my neighbourhood who were raped? May God bless them all.”
Syria’s main political opposition, the Syrian National Coalition, released a statement condemning the atrocity, promising that al-Hamad would be tried in court.
“The Syrian Coalition reiterates its condemnation of such an act and stresses that it is a crime, regardless of the perpetrator,” the group said in a statement released on Facebook.
But Ahmad Chaker, a member of the Syrian National Council, the other main opposition group, said that if the Abu Sakkar video is real, it was an isolated incident.
“A lot of people feel it is a hopeless war and I’m not surprised if people get mad and act like this, but I believe these are individual cases,” he told The Star. “The majority of the opposition leaders and people, they have nothing to do with such stories.”
Houry, however, said atrocities are becoming increasingly common on both sides of the conflict. Last December, a video emerged showing a boy, possibly aged 12, beheading a soldier with a sword as older fighters looked on.
“What is shocking is the climate of impunity that exists and the inability of the international community to come up with a proposal to end this situation, including referring it to the International Criminal Court,” he said.
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2...ers_heart_sparks_widespread_condemnation.html
