MILITANT ORDERED TO KILL HIS MOTHER: ACTIVISTS
Islamic State fighter shot her in front of hundreds of people, monitors say
BEIRUT— An Islamic State militant shot and killed his mother in front of a post office in the northern Syrian city of Raqqa this week after she tried to persuade him to leave the extremist group, Syrian activists there said on Friday.
The fighter, Ali Saqr, 21, killed his mother in front of several hundred people for what the Islamic State group called apostasy, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently (RIBSS), two groups that monitor the conflict through contacts on the ground.
The act was the latest in a chain of brutal and bizarre killings that Islamic State uses, and often widely publicizes, in efforts to tamp down dis- sent and to attract recruits.
It would not be the first time that a member of Islamic State has killed a parent on the group’s orders; last year, a Lebanese father travelled to Raqqa to try to bring back his son, an Islamic State fighter, and three other children whom the son had persuaded to go there. The son reported the father, who was detained and killed, according to interviews with family members.
The events in Raqqa followed a similar trajectory; the mother there, identified by RIBSS as Lena al-Qasem, had urged her son to leave Islamic State and flee Raqqa, the group’s de facto capital.
He reported her comments to Islamic State, which declared that she was guilty of apostasy and ordered her killed. The son was apparently Syrian. His mother, who was in her 40s, lived in the nearby town of Tabaqa and worked in Raqqa, according to the monitoring groups.
Islamic State split from other insurgent groups in 2013. Last year, it took over large parts of Iraq and Syria and declared a so-called caliphate to impose a harsh interpretation of Islam.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says Islamic State has ordered the killing of more than 2,000 people.