Children take eight Isis captives to be beheaded in latest propaganda video

In the video, the captives, wearing orange jumpsuits with their hands tied behind their backs, were led forward in a field by teenage boys

Agency
Monday 30 March 2015 06:18 BST
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In the video, the captives are led forward by a group of armed teenage boys
In the video, the captives are led forward by a group of armed teenage boys

Teenage boys armed with rifles lead eight prisoners to be beheaded in the latest gruesome video released by Isis. The victims are said to be Shia Muslim men in the central Syrian province of Hama.

In the video, the captives, wearing orange jumpsuits with their hands tied behind their backs, were led forward in a field by teenage boys. They were then handed over to a group of Isis fighters. A boy wearing a black uniform hands out knives to the fighters, who then behead the hostages.

The video could not be immediately independently verified, but the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights also said that the video was authentic.

An Isis fighter then uses a derogatory term for Shias and calls them “impure infidels”. The IS fighter said in the video that the current military campaign against IS will only make the militant group stronger.

"Our swords will soon, God willing, reach the Nuseiries and their allies like Bashar and his party," the man said referring to Syrian President Bashar Assad and Lebanon's militant Hezbollah group that is fighting on his side. The word Nuseiry is a derogatory term to refer to Assad's Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam.

In Lebanon, the state-run National News Agency quoted the family of Younes Hujairi, who was kidnapped from his hometown of Arsal near the Syrian border in January, as saying he had been beheaded. NNA quoted members of Hujairi's family as saying they have seen pictures of an IS fighter carrying his severed head on social media.

It was not clear if Hujairi was one of one of the men beheaded in the video. Hujairi is a Sunni, while the video states that all the beheaded men were Shia

The border town of Arsal, where Hujairi was kidnapped, was also the site of a bold joint raid by the Islamic State group and Syria's al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front last August that captured two dozen Lebanese soldiers and policemen. Four of those hostages have been killed so far, two of them beheaded by IS. The remaining 20 soldiers and policemen remain hostages.

IS has beheaded scores of people since capturing large parts of Iraq and Syria last year in a self-declared caliphate.

AP

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