“Remember that cannibal who ate an Assad soldier on camera? That guy is a commander of the non-ISIS moderate forces.”
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Is that the same Syrian rebel that John McCain met with? I wonder what he was served for the meetings’ dinner?
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23190533
Face-to-face with Abu Sakkar, Syria’s ‘heart-eating cannibal’
By Paul Wood BBC News, Syria
5 July 2013
It sounded like the most far-fetched propaganda claim - a Syrian rebel commander who cut out the heart of a fallen enemy soldier, and ate it before a cheering crowd of his men.
The story turned out to be true in its most important aspect - a ritual demonstration of cannibalism - though when I met the commander, Abu Sakkar, in Syria last week, he seemed hazy on the details.
“I really don’t remember,” he says, when I ask if it was the man’s heart, as reported at the time, or liver, or a piece of lung, as a doctor who saw the video said. He goes on: “I didn’t bite into it. I just held it for show.”
The video says otherwise. It is one of the most gruesome to emerge from Syria’s civil war. In it, Abu Sakkar stands over an enemy corpse, slicing into the flesh.
“It looks like you’re carving him a Valentine’s heart,” says one of his men, raucously. Abu Sakkar picks up a bloody handful of something and declares: “We will eat your hearts and your livers you soldiers of Bashar the dog.”
Then he brings his hand up to his mouth and his lips close around whatever he is holding. At the time the video was released, in May, we rang him and he confirmed to us that he had indeed taken a ritual bite (of a piece of lung, he said).
Now, meeting him face-to-face, he seems a bit more circumspect, though his anger builds when I ask why he carried out this depraved act.
“I didn’t want to do this. I had to,” he tells me. “We have to terrify the enemy, humiliate them, just as they do to us. Now, they won’t dare be wherever Abu Sakkar is.”
In a YouTube video from June 2011, Abu Sakkar can be seen at the front of a crowd waving olive branches to greet deserting army officers. He took up arms against the regime, one of the first to join a new organisation called the Free Syrian Army (FSA).