Reports | 25 05 2020
A fighter in the ranks of the armed opposition killed a child who was captured on the front of northern Aleppo, by slitting his throat, on Tuesday.
A group of fighters affiliated with the opposition appeared in a video spread on social networking sites, sitting next to the prisoner child in a red pickup, describing him as a recruit at the al-Quds Brigade which is fighting alongside the Syrian regime's army, one of the men said in the video: "These are the prisoners of al-Quds Brigade today, no men in their troops today, they are enlisting children!!" referring to the Syrian regime's army and armed groups fighting on his side. The child looked pale, injured in his leg, hand and head, and a fighter was holding him from his hair.
The opposition media has published this morning, the image of the child and said he was "Abdullah al-Issa, a fighter in the ranks of al-Quds Brigade pro-regime forces, who was captured by the opposition factions, during the battles took place in ‘Handarat’ camp."
And the video of the execution process was posted on social networking sites, where one of the fighters appeared in the video while slaughtering the child’s throat with a knife, and shouting "Allahu Akbar, these are your men Bashar Assad, your grave is in Handarat."
The military Movement (Nur al-Din Al-Zanki) issued on Tuesday evening a statement condemning what appeared in the video, on the fighters who slaughtered the prisoner child on the Handarat front, northern Aleppo.
According to the statement, that this violation "does not represent the general situation of the movement, but was an individual error does not represent the policy of the movement" and added that they decided to "form a judicial commission to investigate what was published" and that it had launched an arrest warrant for all persons who abuse."
As the legal adviser of the "Free Syrian Army", Osama Abu Zeid, commented on the incident saying "no matter how brutal and heinous the crimes of the enemy were, we must continue to uphold the principles of our revolution, what happened today is a shame and we should repudiate it."
The incident sparked a wave of anger among Syrian activists, deploring the execution of a child, while others justified what happened and said that "the picture that has been published is not for a child, he is 19-year-old, named Abdullah al-Issa, who was born in the city of Homs in 1997".
While the Syrian doctor Hassan Dwehi, stressed in a telephone interview with Rozana, that "according to the image, the child is in between 15 to 16-year-old, and it doesn’t appear to be afflicted with dwarfism, or to be 19-year-old."
The United Nations has documented 278 recruiting situations in Syria for the children of the age of eight years in 2014, and said that 77% of child combatants engaged in direct combat operations. The Documenting Violations Center documented the killing of 305 armed children since 2011 until today.