Qaeda Group in Iraq Says It Killed Syrian Soldiers
By HANIA MOURTADA and RICK GLADSTONE
BEIRUT, Lebanon - A Sunni militant jihadist group in Iraq claimed
responsibility on Monday for killing dozens of Syrian soldiers who had
sought temporary safety on the Iraqi side of the border last week, boasting
about the massacre in an Internet posting that used demeaning references to
Shiites and President Bashar al-Assad's Alawite sect.
The message from the group, the Islamic State of Iraq, which is affiliated
with Al Qaeda, reflected the hardened sectarian animus spreading from the
Syrian conflict, in which insurgents from the Sunni majority are battling to
topple Mr. Assad and his Alawite minority, an offshoot of Shiite Islam. The
conflict, now two years old, has increasingly become a proxy for a Sunni
versus Shiite struggle in the Middle East.
The group's claim of responsibility for the massacre, one of the worst
episodes of cross-border violence in the conflict so far, coincided with
news of a religious decree from Syria's grand mufti, Sheik Ahmad Badr
al-Deen Hassoun, who is Sunni but is closely linked to Mr. Assad's
government. In the decree, Sheik Hassoun exhorted "all mothers and fathers
in the homeland" to enlist their children in the Syrian Army to vanquish
what he called a conspiracy of foreign enemies, including traitorous Arabs,
Zionists and Westerners.
The decree is notable because it suggests that Mr. Assad's armed forces are
in need of more recruits and may begin to strictly enforce compulsory
service laws for the first time since the conflict began.
It also appeared to be a call to jihad - a marked departure for Mr. Assad,
who has always sought to portray himself as secular and tolerant. He has
often denounced the Sunni extremist calls to jihad against him propagated by
some elements of the insurgency.
Sheik Hassoun issued the decree in a statement by the Dar al-Ifta Council,
the highest official Muslim body in Syria linked to the government. It was
read on Syrian television news on Sunday evening, sprinkled with some of the
same fevered jihadist language used by Sunni insurgents to recruit more
fighters. Sheik Hassoun repeated the same ideas in interviews on Syrian
television and the official SANA news agency.
"Today we are fighting on several fronts," said Sheik Hassoun, whose own son
was ambushed and killed by Syrian insurgents in October 2011. "Against our
cousins who have betrayed us and some sons of this nation who have been
brainwashed and whose identities have been wiped and who are sitting with
the French, British, Americans, asking them for weapons to destroy and
dismantle Syria and to tear the Muslim and Arab world apart."
Apparently referring to the Sunni Arab nations supporting the insurgents,
notably Saudi Arabia and Qatar, he said that "targeting Syria, the land of
divine messages, is basically targeting the Arab and Islamic nation."
Syrian social media traffic surged in reaction to Sheik Hassoun's decree,
especially from young men in Syria who expressed concern they would now be
seized at checkpoints and made to enlist. One antigovernment group posted an
altered picture on Facebook of a Syrian television news anchorwoman on a
pro-government channel wearing a hijab with a caption joking that it was her
"new garment after the mufti's call for jihad."
In a posting on jihadist forums about the March 4 massacre, the Islamic
State of Iraq described how its fighters had ambushed a convoy of Syrian
soldiers in Iraq's Anbar Province who were traveling under Iraqi military
escort back to the Syrian border. The Syrian soldiers had taken shelter in
Iraq a day earlier from an insurgent attack on a different frontier post, on
the border with Iraq's Nineveh Province.
The ambush area, the posting said, "became a graveyard in which the blood of
the filthy ones from the Rafidah and the Nusaryis is mixed." Rafidah is a
derogatory term for Shiites, and Nusaryi is a derogatory reference to
Alawites.
According to a transcript of the posting by the SITE Intelligence Group, a
service in Bethesda, Md., that monitors jihadist Internet traffic, the
Islamic State of Iraq's fighters detonated bombs that hit the bus convoy,
then opened fire on the occupants with light and medium weapons and
rocket-propelled grenades. At least 42 Syrian soldiers and officials and as
many as 14 Iraqis were killed.
The sectarian theme of the conflict was also underscored in an updated
report on Syria released on Monday by a United Nations Human Rights Council
panel in Geneva, which said that mass killings, some of them sectarian in
nature, had been committed by local community "Popular Committees" acting as
auxiliary government forces.
"The war displays all the signs of a destructive stalemate," Paulo Pinheiro,
a Brazilian rights investigator who has been leading the Syria panel of
inquiry, told the Human Rights Council in the update. "Neither party seems
able to prevail over the other militarily. The result has been an escalation
in the use of force in the fallacious belief that victory is within reach."
As a result, the areas in which civilians could find refuge from violent
conflict had shrunk in the past two months, the panel's report said.
Mr. Pinheiro said the panel was investigating about 20 massacres, some of
them apparently committed by the insurgent side.
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