Mohammed Fares, a commander with Ahrar al-Sham, a Sunni Islamist group that often fights alongside al-Qaeda, was accidentally beheaded after getting mistaken for somebody else.
A spokesman for the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), which opposes the rule of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and is linked to al-Qaeda, apologized for beheading Fares. The group thought they had beheaded a member of a militia fighting for al-Assad, reported the Daily Telegraph.
Fares was injured and thought he’d been captured by that militia, so he asked members of the ISIS to kill him, said Omar al-Qahtani, the spokesman.
The admission comes after a graphic video circulating on YouTube that shows two men holding up the decapitated head in front of a crowd.
“He is an Iraqi Shiite volunteer fighter in Bashar al-Assad’s army,” said one of the men in Arabic.
The Syrian Observatory of Human Rights said that the ISIS misunderstood comments made by Fares about Imams Ali and Hussein, who founded Shiism.
Qahtani said that the men who killed Fares would be forgiven, citing Mohammed when he said Allah would forgive a man who killed a believer in error.
“The mistake, of a sort commonly cited as an argument against the death penalty around the world, is indicative of the chaos within rebel ranks, particularly since the rise of ISIS over the summer,” according to the Telegraph. “Several other Islamist groups have formed alliances without its participation, but it continues to exercise control over large areas of northern Syria.”
Its ferocity has given rise to an exodus of moderate and secular activists, and brought to an end an uneasy truce between the Free Syrian Army and Kurdish militias, the most prominent of which has in the last month taken on ISIS and driven them out of a number of towns in the north-east.”
