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Syria War crimes

Syrian rebels use a child to behead a prisoner

Extensive and horrifying footage of an incident in which two men are executed by beheading in which a child participates now comes from two different sources.

Footage posted to YouTube by Voice of America Arabic (Radio Sawa) anchor and journalist Zaid Benjamin, shows a child hacking a prisoner’s neck with a machete. Unsurprisingly, the video is being constantly pulled from YouTube due to its shocking and disgusting content.

child beheading prisoner

The footage from Zaid Benjamin shows rebels displaying the man’s severed head while chanting “Allahu Akbar.”

The camera then shows two bodies with the heads being placed on them.

Zaid Benjamin says he was given the video by a commander in Homs.

The two victims are allegedly “Alawite Officers in Homs Believed to Be Behind Hola Massacre.” (Highly unlikely of course). It is also claimed that this video dates from 9 December.

In fact, different footage of the same incident was previously shown on 26 November on Sama TV (A Syrian channel) as part of a segment which demonstrated the difference between Turkish propaganda on the Syrian conflict and the actual reality.

The footage shown by Sama was edited to remove the most graphic content, but shows more of the background to the incident. The Free Syrian Army (FSA) brigade involved is apparently the Khalid ibn al-Waleed brigade.

Here are some stills:

To begin with we see two middle-aged men who are seated between their captors in handcuffs:

prior to execution

However, the prisoners (who are not identified) are then beaten and taken out into the street by a group of men and the boy. Some men start asking to stop filming. One guy even mentions that they have already executed 80 other men. The FSA then asks people who cannot tolerate gruesome acts to back off.

The prisoners are led to their execution
The prisoners are led to their execution

One of the men is forced to the ground and a breeze-block is put under his head.

The man is forced to the ground
The first man is forced to the ground

We see the child getting ready to strike the prisoner. As is often the case in Syria, there is more than one person filming the incident on a mobile.

child execution second camera

It is the child who strikes the first blow with a machete.

The second man is then beheaded by an adult. Another man hacks at the first victim’s head repeatedly as the boy did not cut it off completely. Then the child poses with a gun over the body of one of the victims who has his severed head placed on his torso.

boy posing by decapitated body

It has long been known that the rebels in Homs have executed large numbers of their prisoners as reported in Spiegel Online in March when one rebel brigade estimated they had killed 200-250.

Yesterday, in our article on the widespread use of child soldiers by Syrian rebels we said,

“From watching footage from rebel media it is clear some rebels are making a special effort to bring very young, impressionable children to their sectarian, jihadi ideology.”

Well, apparently they aren’t content with that, and the use of a child as an executioner marks a new low.

One can only hope that media and public opinion might dissuade the likes of Barack Obama, Recep Erdogen and David Cameron from continuing to support these terrorists.

 

47 replies on “Syrian rebels use a child to behead a prisoner”

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