IS militants kill one of dozens of hostages in southern Syria
BEIRUT: The IS group has executed one of dozens of Druze hostages abducted from Syria’s southern province of Sweida last week, a journalist in the area and a monitor said on Sunday.
IS went on a rampage in Sweida on July 25, killing more than 250 people — mostly civilians — in the deadliest attack ever to target the mostly government-held province and its Druze religious minority.
The militants also kidnapped more than 30 people, most of them women and children, from a village in the province, which had previously remained largely isolated from Syria’s seven-year civil war.
On Thursday, IS killed a 19-yearold male student who was among the hostages, the head of the Sweida24 news website Nour Radwan said.
Quoting relatives, Radwan, who was speaking from Sweida, said the young man was taken from the village of Al Shabki on July 25 along with his mother.
His family received two videos, the first showing him being decapitated and the second of him speaking before being killed as well as images of his body after his death, Radwan said.
Sweida24 posted online part of a second video, which was seen by AFP, showing a bearded young man who appeared to be sitting on the ground in a landscape of grey rocks.
He is wearing a black T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms, and his hands are tied behind his back.
IS has not claimed the kidnappings and did not publish the video on its usual channels.
IS militants have lost much of the territory they once controlled in Syria after overrunning large swathes of it in 2014, but they retain a presence in the east of the country and in the vast Badiya desert that sweeps through its south. The government has been fighting in recent weeks to expel IS fighters from a patch in the neighbouring province of Deraa.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor, said the young man’s execution was the first since the kidnappings.
The execution came “after the failure of talks between IS and Syrian forces over the transfer of IS fighters from the southwest of Deraa province to the Badiya” desert.
It also follows the execution of 50 IS fighters and civilians in Deraa province earlier last week at the hands of rebels, according to the monitor, which relies on a network of sources inside Syria.
Last Friday, a top Druze religious leader said Syrian ally Russia was in talks with the IS over the release of those abducted in Sweida. Sweida24 said the oldest woman seized was 60.
Druze, which made up three per cent of Syria’s population before 2011.