War crime? Syrian rebels execute POWs
A
horrifying amateur video from Syria emerged online, showing an
apparent mass execution of pro-government forces in Aleppo at the
hands of rebels from the Free Syria Army.
RT,
1
August, 2012
The
footage shows several bloodied men stripped down to their underwear
being forced to kneel by a wall amidst a throng of excited, machine
gun-touting men.
Once
their captors open fire, the camera jerks away as the crowd
momentarily disperses, seemingly unprepared for the nearly 40 seconds
of uninterrupted shooting that follows. As the gunfire dies down,
shouts of“Allahu Akbar!” resound as the once skittish onlookers
victoriously raise their guns in the air, approaching what appears to
be a pile of stripped-down corpses.
One
of the victims has been identified as Ali Zeineddin al-Berri, who has
been accused of leading a shabiha group which killed 15 FSA soldiers
during a truce in Aleppo on Tuesday, BBC reports.
The
video depicting the apparent massacre has not been verified, though
the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said such vengeance
was a crime as Islamic law does not authorize the execution of
prisoners.
Clive
Baldwin, a senior legal adviser for Human Rights Watch (HRW), told
BBC News: "What it looks like is execution of detainees and if
that is the case, that would be a war crime."
Russia’s
Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Gennady Gatilov condemned the
shooting. "The brutal massacre of government supporters by the
opposition in the city of Aleppo shows that human rights violations
are being committed by both sides,” he wrote on Twitter.
It
is not the first time that reports have emerged of rebels carrying
out executions against pro-Assad forces without trial.
Ahmed,
a rebel fighter from the Amr bin al-Aas brigade which operates in the
Syrian town of Azaz, recounted the execution of a Syrian army sniper
named Rami who was shot dead after a graveside “trial,” Reuters
reports.
Ahmed
says Rami was firing from the top of a high minaret at a local mosque
before he was captured.
"We
took him right to his grave and, after hearing the witnesses'
statements, we shot him dead," the agency sites Ahmed as saying.
Ahmed
made it clear that his forces often capture “handfuls of soldiers”
in battle, saying that his men would create courts for the captured
men and execute them.
However,
when pressed on the specifics of creating makeshift courts to justify
killing those captured in battle, Ahmed remained stoic.
"The
culture of lawyers has long passed. I mean a guy like that,"
Ahmed said, referring to the slain sniper Rami, “what do you think
his fate should be?"
Such
extra-judicial killings might be a sign of things to come if the
17-month uprising against President Bashar al-Assad spins further out
of control.
Achtung
Photoshop! Austria’s largest daily doctors Syrian photos
RT,
1
August, 2012
Bloggers
have accused Austria's largest newspaper of using Photoshop to make
the battle-ravaged Syrian city of Aleppo look even more war-torn than
it already is.
The
controversial photo accompanied an article entitled Assads Armee
rollt mit Panzem zur, Mutter aller Schlachten ("Assad’s Army
tanks pave the way for the ‘mother of all battles'") in the
July 28 edition of Die Kronen Zeitung.
It
depicts a man holding a child walking alongside a woman in a hijab as
they are flanked by the ruins of what appear to be bombed-out
apartment blocks.
But
astute bloggers on the popular social networking site Reddit realized
that while the photo was real, something was fishy about the
backdrop.
It
turns out the original photo appeared on the European Pressphoto
Agency’s website on July 26. But instead of walking through the
bombed-out heart of Syria’s largest city, the trio in question are
clearly walking through a typical urban landscape where the most
striking feature just might be the graffiti-tagged wall they are
passing.
With
200,000 people having fled Aleppo since it became the epicenter of
the 17-month uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, using
Photoshop to dramatize the conflict smacked of overkill to many
bloggers.
Critics
on Reddit accused the daily of spicing up the print to sell copy,
though several posters also accused the newspaper of being biased
against pro-government forces.
The
“Krone” has a daily readership of around 3 million people, some
43 per cent of the total newspaper audience in the country.
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