Syrian Rebel Reportedly Defends Sinking His Teeth Into Dead Soldier’s Flesh on Camera
A Syrian rebel commander who appeared to bite into the flesh of a government soldier’s corpse in a horrifying video clip posted on YouTube this week defended his actions in an interview with Time magazine on Tuesday. The rebel, Khaled al-Hamad, known by the nom de guerre Abu Sakkar, confirmed that he did sink his teeth into an internal organ he had laboriously carved out of the dead soldier’s chest as a colleague recorded the scene. “Our slogan,” he said, “is an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”
As The Lede reported on Monday, the extremely graphic, distressing video has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times on YouTube since it was uploaded by supporters of President Bashar al-Assad who called it evidence that the war in Syria is a fight against sectarian extremists from the Sunni sect of Islam.
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The rebel commander, who has also been accused by Human Rights Watch of taking part in the indiscriminate shelling of Shiite Muslim villages across the border in Lebanon, said that he had never before tried to eat the liver of a dead enemy soldier. (According to surgeon who screened the video for Time magazine, the organ was not the dead man’s liver but part of his lung.)
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/14/syrian-rebel-reportedly-defends-sinking-his-teeth-into-dead-soldiers-flesh-on-camera/
[It looks like President Obama wisely chose to avoid intervening in Syria's civil war, despite the insistence of the likes of McCain and Lindsay Graham. If Obama had intervened, the Republicans would be successfully linking his administration to these activities. A disaster has been averted.]