Islamic State militant 'killed his own mother in Syria'

An Islamic State militant has murdered his mother in public in the Syrian city of Raqqa, according to human rights groups.

Citing local sources, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the 20-year-old man killed his mother, Leena al-Qasem, on Wednesday near the post office building where she worked in front of hundreds of people in Raqqa, a main base of operations for the group in Syria. Al-Qasem was known locally as “mother of the mail”.

According to the Observatory, a British-based group that monitors the war through a network of sources on the ground, the woman in her 40s had warned her son that a US-backed alliance would wipe out Isis and had encouraged him to leave the city with her. She was then reportedly detained after he informed the group of her comments.

According to a local resident, the assailant’s mother was originally from Jabla, a town in Latakia that is a regime stronghold. She was Alawite, but married a Raqqa man who divorced her about five years ago. She stayed in Raqqa with her son and daughter, now 20 and 25.

The resident said Isis told people she was killed for apostasy. “This was the first time someone has executed his own mother,” he said. “People are shocked that someone can kill his own mother in such cold blood. He was known to be a bad apple but nobody imagined he would go so far as to kill his own mother. Everybody is asking how they could have brainwashed him so much?”

Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently (RBSS), an activist group documenting atrocities committed by Isis and the Assad regime, also reported the murder on social media, naming the killer as Ali Saqr.

A user known as Abu Mohammed, a founder of RBSS, also reported that the woman was killed after her son accused her of apostasy.

Though Isis is known for its violent murder videos, Rami Abdulrahman of the Observatory said he did not know whether the killing was videotaped.

Abdulrahman said he thought he had heard of an Isis fighter who had killed his father, but this was the first matricide he was aware of. “It is the first time we’ve recorded this,” he said.

Isis, which controls large swaths of Syria and Iraq, has killed hundreds of people it has accused of working with its enemies or breaching its ultra-conservative interpretation of Islam.

The Observatory reported on 29 December that Isis had killed more than 2,000 Syrian civilians in the 18 months since it declared a “caliphate” over the territory it controls in Syria and Iraq. They included people killed on the grounds of homosexuality, practising magic and apostasy.

RBSS said this week that female journalist Ruqia Hassan had been killed for writing about life in the city since it became an Isis stronghold, as well as the documenting the coalition air strikes against the group.

Source: The Guardian News.