Human rights groups expressed something approaching horror earlier this week after a video was posted online showing a Syrian rebel commander cutting out the organs of a Syrian soldier and eating one of them. The video allegedly shows Abu Sakkar, the founder of opposition group Farouq Brigade, excising the organs of a dead soldier and then – to chants of “Allahu akbar [God is great]” biting into either the heart or the liver or the lung. Experts are divided as to which organ was specifically chosen for consumption:

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 a surgeon who screened the video for Time magazine, the organ was not the dead man’s liver but part of his lung.)

A Human Rights Watch spokesman emphasized that the clip underscored the hardening sectarian dynamics of the Syrian conflict, and also that eating the organs of one’s enemies necessarily involves multiple war crimes. 

Sakkar subsequently defended his actions:

Speaking to Time’s Middle East bureau chief, Aryn Baker, by Skype, Abu Sakkar, a Sunni, said that the atrocity was prompted by video footage on the dead soldier’s phone that showed the man torturing and sexually abusing three naked women before he was killed. Abu Sakkar also blamed the broader descent into brutality on fighters from Syria’s Alawite religious minority, to which the president belongs. “You are not seeing what we are seeing and you are not living what we are living,” he said. “Where are my brothers, my friends, the girls of my neighborhood who were raped?”

Polls show that a broad majority of Americans believe the U.S. should not intervene in the Syrian civil war. Evidence of brutality conducted by opposition groups is likely to deepen those sentiments.

[Photo:independent.co.uk]