Syrian rebels go straight for the heart

The video uploaded Sunday of a Syrian rebel militia leader dismembering the body and eating the heart of a Syrian soldier gave the Syrian government of Bashar Assad a rare propaganda victory this week and has stoked doubts for the international community about the wisdom of backing the Syrian opposition.

The gruesome video shows rebel militia commander Khaled al-Hamad cutting out the lungs, guts, and heart of an unnamed Syrian soldier before threatening to do the same to “all Alawite dogs.” The video was first thought to be hoax created by the Assad government, but was later verified to be true when Hamad confirmed it was him on video.

Hamad claims he was driven to commit the bloody act after he viewed cell clips of the Syrian soldier harassing a naked woman and her two daughters with a stick. In interviews with Hamad, he admitted to chopping up other Syrian soldiers with a saw.

The Doha-based media channel Al-Jazeera reports that the Free Syria Army has promised it will punish those in its ranks responsible for committing violations during the fighting in Syria.

“Any act committed that is contrary to the values of the Syrian people will result in the swift punishment of the abuser,” reads a statement released by the General Staff of the Free Syria Army. “This act is unacceptable and not a reflection of the morality of the Syrian people or of the Free Syria Army.”

Despite this official declaration, leaders of certain al-Qaeda-affiliated militias that make up the Free Syria Army are offering only praise for the brutality Hamad inflicted on his enemy.

“This soldier deserves only praise,” an anonymous commander in the Faruq battalion near Homs told Al-Jazeera. “You do not see what they [the Syrian military] are doing to us where we live? Where are my brothers, my friends, and my neighbors now? They are dead. All the girls have been raped!”

Leading Arab columnists who strongly support the toppling of the Syrian regime write of their disgust with the actions of members of the Free Syria Army, a group they have wholeheartedly supported. Abdel Bari Atwan, the outgoing editor of the London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi, writes in an op-ed entitled “Mutilation” that the opposition is supposed to provide the best model for tolerance and restraint, and not to embrace the practices that sparked their rebellion in the first place.

“We are seeing on video a Syrian opposition fighter chopping up a soldier’s body, grabbing his heart, and then offering a 10-year-old boy the chance to saw off his head before other fighters chop off the man’s penis,” Atwan writes, dismayed.

“The whole world now sees that we, as Arabs and as Muslims, are butchers with cruel hearts and that the only thing that interests us is slaughter and more bloodshed. . . Where did this hateful culture come from? It is not a culture of Islam. Islam is a religion of tolerance and does not respect the mutilation of dead bodies.”

Atwan goes to lament that Syria was once the finest example of ethnic coexistence in the Arab world. Now, he says, he “cannot imagine reconciliation between the sons of this stricken country for decades, if not centuries to come.”

In response, the London-based pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat reports that the Syrian opposition does not deny the occurrence of human rights-related violations by rebels, but insists they are rare individual incidents that pale in comparison with the acts committed by the Syrian regime.

The release of the video may further delay any potential weapons shipments to the Syrian opposition from Western countries. Great fear exist in Europe, the US, and even the Gulf countries that certain large segments of the Syrian opposition may in fact be more amoral than Assad’s forces.

However, that fear has not stopped the United Nations General Assembly from overwhelmingly passing a resolution blaming the Syrian government for the civil war and backing the opposition as the legitimate leadership of Syria in any transitional phase.

The Saudi-owned daily A-Sharq Al-Awsat reports that 107 nations voted for the Gulf Arab-drafted resolution, 12 were against, and 59 abstained. The resolution specifically holds the Syrian government responsible for all violence that occurs in the country, regardless of its source, and calls for UN investigators to enter the country to investigate possible chemical weapons use.

Syria’s ambassador to the UN, Bashar Jaafari, condemned the resolution and accused the countries who voted for it of not addressing the terrorism afflicting the country, the Dubai-based media network Al-Arabiya explains.

“The international community will be responsible for Syria’s destruction and continued division if it continues to support the rebels,” Jaafari said in his UN address.

Russian ambassador Alexander Pankin agreed that the resolution “is especially harmful and destructive now and does not help achieve a political solution to the crisis in Syria.”