Lebanese Ministry of Information
Islamic State has executed one of dozens of Druze hostages abducted from Syria’s southern province of Sweida last month, a Syrian news website and a monitor said yesterday.
ISIS killed the 19-year-old male student on Thursday after kidnapping more than 30 people, mostly women and children, from a village in Sweida during a deadly rampage last week, said the head of the Sweida24 news website Nour Radwan.
Quoting relatives, Radwan 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.
Sweida24 posted online part of a second video showing a young man who appeared to be sitting on the ground in a rocky landscape.
His is wearing a black T-shirt and his hands are tied behind his back. The video could not be independently verified.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor, said it was the first execution since the kidnappings.
On July 25, ISIS carried out a series of attacks in Sweida’s provincial capital and several villages that killed more than 250 people, mostly civilians.
It was the deadliest attack ever to target the mostly government-held province and the Druze religious minority that populates it.
AFP
