On Tuesday, the Washington Post posted an article about the Syrian rebels. It seems that the rebels, which we are considering sending aid to, executed a fourteen-year-old boy because he insulted the Prophet Mohammed.
The article reports:
When a 14-year-old boy from the Syrian city of Aleppo named Mohammad Qatta was asked to bring one of his customers some coffee, he reportedly refused, saying, “Even if [Prophet] Mohammed comes back to life, I won’t.”
According to a story reported by two grassroots Syrian opposition groups, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the Aleppo Media Center, Qatta’s words got him killed. A group of Islamist rebels, driving by in a black car, reportedly heard the exchange. They stopped the car, grabbed the boy and took him away.
The boy was later brought back to the place where he was grabbed, and shot to death in front of his family.
The article concludes:
The influx of avowed jihadists and extremists is bad news for Syrians, and not just because those under rebel rule have to worry about sharing Qatta’s fate if they are perceived as insufficiently pious. The growth of these groups seems bound to exacerbate tensions between rebel factions, easing Assad’s military path to victory, and scaring off the Western powers that might otherwise be persuaded to lend the rebels greater support. Lots of people in and outside of Syria could get behind the idea of ousting a cruel and unpopular dictator and replacing him with something more democratic. But few things are more universally loathed than an al-Qaeda-allied group that executes children.
Unfortunately, there is no one we should support in the Syrian civil war. It is unfortunate that civilians are the victims in this struggle, but this is a struggle that will not have a happy ending–neither side supports any sort of freedom for the people of Syria. To further complicate things, Russia and Iran are working very hard to keep the current regime in place. Our involvement in the Syrian civil war would essentially put us in a proxy war with Russia and Iran. We have been in a proxy war with Iran for years, but I really don’t think it would be wise to add Russia to the mix.
