November 29 2013
Sunnis rebels in Syria have apologized profusely for beheading a fellow Sunni rebel, saying they had thought the victim was Shia and thereby fully warranted beheading.
The victim was believed to be either Syrian or Iraqi. His severed head was held up to a crowd in Aleppo and a video of that posted on YouTube showing a man telling the crowd that if Shiite “infidels” are allowed free run, “They will come and rape the men before the women.”
Meanwhile, in Iraq 44 Shiites were killed in three bombing attacks that disrupted the Shiite holy day of Ashura. It did not appear that any Iranians were among the dead, although more than 100,000 were reported in Iraq to mark Ashura.
The beheading in Syria was conducted by members of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), a rebel group linked to Al-Qaeda.
They discovered Moham-ed Fares Marroush—a man in his mid to late twenties—in a hospital after a battle last week near Aleppo. Badly wounded and under anesthesia, they heard him muttering the names of Shiite religious figures—“Ya Zaynab” and “Ya Hossain”—according to a group that monitors the Syrian war and a spokesman for ISIS, Omar al-Qahtani.
When a hospital aide told them he believed Marroush was Shiite, they promptly killed him, according to an account posted to Twitter by Qahtani.
Last Wednesday, the same day he is believed to have been killed, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition group that is based in Britain and draws information from activists in Syria, posted a video on YouTube that showed two jihadis holding aloft Marroush’s severed head and warning a crowd about the dangers posed by Shiites.
“If they come here, they won’t differentiate between opposition and government supporters,” said one jihadi in the video, while the other held Marroush’s head in one hand and a knife in the other. “They will come and rape the men before the women, that’s what these infidels will do. They will rape the men before the women. God make us victorious over them!”
But it quickly was learned that Marroush was a rebel fighter with Ahrar al-Sham, an Islamist group allied with ISIS.
It is not clear why, in his injured state, Marroush muttered Shiite religious invocations. But Qahtani, the rebel spokesman, presumed that Marroush thought he had been captured by Shiites and was trying to protect himself.
In his statement, Qahtani said there would be no punishment of the men who killed Marroush. He said Islam teaches that if one man kills another after careful thought but with an erroneous assumption, that is not murder, the death is not a crime and there can be no revenge (qasas) exacted under Sharia law.
