ISIS behead a druze hostage kidnapped in the Suweida attack
The victim is a young 19-year-old student, kidnapped with his mother. The family received two videos, one of the execution. However, the official media of the Caliphate have not yet claimed or re-posted the act. “Failure” of negotiations with government forces, behind beheading.
The militias of the Islamic State (IS, ex Isis) have beheaded one of the dozens of hostages kidnapped last month in the context of a bloody attack on Suweida, Syria, against the Druze community.
According to the Soueida24 site, the victim is a young 19-year-old student, kidnapped with his mother from the village of Chabké during the jihadist raid. The family received two videos confirming the execution: the first film contains the brutal murder; in the second the boy, still alive, begs the negotiators to respond to ISIS “demands”.
On July 25, the jihadists launched coordinated attacks in the southern province, causing over 250 victims. During the retreat, the ISIS troops withdrew about thirty women and children, while at the same time at least 17 men belonging to the community disappeared. One of these is the young beheaded student in recent days; according to some sources, the execution dates back to 2 August.
So far, the Islamic State has not claimed the execution, nor the mass seizure of last month. The militia, contrary to a customary practice in the past, have not even released any image or video on the “official” media of the Caliphate, still used today to feed the fundamentalist propaganda.
The province of Suweida is inhabited largely by the Druze minority, which represented about 3% of the total Syrian population before the war (almost 700 thousand people). In recent days, a senior member of the Druze community spoke of negotiations between ISIS leaders and Russian officials, allies of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the conflict, for the release of the hostages.
The execution by beheading, the first since the kidnapping, confirms the “failure of the negotiations” with the government forces “on the transfer of the jihadists from the south-west of the province of Deraa, towards Badiya”. In these hours, a group linked to the Islamic State has been driven from the last bastion left in the province of Deraa, bordering Suweida.
After a rapid rise in the second half of 2014 and 2105 in Syria and Iraq, coming to conquer half of the territory and staining itself with very serious crimes against humanity, the jihadists have gradually lost ground. Today they control only some limited areas; however, their ideology remains alive and military defeat has not erased their threat.
The beheading of Suweida is the first execution of a civil hostage by ISIS for over a year. In recent days images of a Japanese journalist – in the hands of al Nusra – were posted online appealing to the Tokyo government to free him.
Source: Asia News
