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BEIRUT (AP) — A cleric read the verdict before the truck came and
dumped a large pile of stones near the municipal garden. Jihadi
fighters then brought in the woman, clad head to toe in black, and put
her in a small hole in the ground. When residents gathered, the
fighters told them to carry out the sentence: Stoning to death for the
alleged adulteress. None in the crowd stepped forward, said a witness
to the event in a northern Syrian city. So the jihadi fighters, mostly
foreign extremists, did it themselves, pelting Faddah Ahmad with
stones until her body was dragged away. "Even when she was hit with
stones she did not scream or move," said an opposition activist who
said he witnessed the stoning near the football stadium and the Bajaa
garden in the city of Raqqa, the main Syrian stronghold of the Islamic
State group. The July 18 stoning was the second in a span of 24 hours.
A day earlier, 26-year-old Shamseh Abdullah was killed in a similar
way in the nearby town of Tabqa by Islamic State fighters. Both were
accused of having sex outside marriage. The killings were the first of
their kind in rebel-held northern Syria, where jihadis from the
Islamic State group have seized large swaths of territory, terrorizing
residents with their strict interpretation of Islamic law, including
beheadings and cutting off the hands of thieves. The jihadis recently
tied a 14-year-old boy to a cross-like structure and left him for
several hours in the scorching summer sun before bringing him down —
punishment for not fasting during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
The group has also brutalized Shiite Muslims and others whom it views
as apostates. In neighboring Iraq, Islamic State militants have driven
members of the Yazidi religious minority out of a string of towns and
villages. Thousands of the fleeing Yazidis have been stranded on a
mountaintop for days, a humanitarian crisis that prompted the U.S. to
airlift aid to them this week. On Friday, Kamil Amin, the spokesman
for Iraq's Human Rights Ministry, said hundreds of Yazidi women under
the age of 35 are being held by the Islamic State group in schools in
Iraq's second largest city Mosul, which the militants captured in
June. The stonings in Syria last month were not widely publicized at
the time, but in the following days three photographs appeared online
which appeared to document the grisly spectacle and were consistent
with other AP reporting. The pictures posted on a newly-created
Twitter account showed dozens of people gathered in a square, a cleric
reading a verdict through a loudspeaker and several bearded men with
automatic rifles either carrying or collecting stones. "A married
woman being stoned in the presence of some believers," read the
caption of the photographs on the Twitter account, which has since
been suspended. Abu Ibrahim Raqqawi, the activist who witnessed
Ahmad's stoning, said locals where angry to see foreign fighters
impose their will on the community. "People were shocked and couldn't
understand what was going on. Many were disturbed by the idea that
Saudis and Tunisians were issuing (such) orders," he said in an
interview via Skype. Ahmad, he said, appeared unconscious, and he had
overheard that she was earlier taken to a hospital where she was given
anesthesia. The stoning took place after dark, he said, at about 11
p.m. He could not see blood on the body because of the black clothes
she was wearing. Ahmad did not scream or shake, and died silently.
"They then took the dead body in one of their cars and left," he said.
The two cases were first reported by the Britain-based Syrian
Observatory for Human Rights, which collects information through a
network of activists around the country. Bassam Al-Ahmad, a spokesman
for the Violations Documentation Center, a Syrian group that tracks
human rights violations, also confirmed the stoning. An activist based
in the northern province of Idlib, who collects information from other
activists in northern Syria, said Ahmad was a widow. A man who asked
to be identified as Asad for fear of repercussions, said that in the
other stoning, in Tabqa, residents also refused to take part, and that
the act was carried out by Islamic State members. The U.S. Embassy in
Syria, in a statement posted on its Twitter account, condemned the
"barbaric stoning" of a woman in Tabqa. International human rights
groups did not report the stoning, and Human Rights Watch said it had
no independent confirmation. "It is a very worrying trend if true,"
said Human Rights Watch researcher Lama Fakih. The Islamic State group
has "imposed incredibly restrictive rules on the civilian population
which have served to make women and girls particularly vulnerable and
to quite clearly discriminate against them," she said, adding that the
reports of the stoning were the first the group had received out of
Syria. "This is just a more sort of extreme manifestation of those
restrictive rules which are all in violation of international" human
rights law, she said. Such acts have alarmed members of mainstream
Syrian opposition groups fighting to remove President Bashar Assad
from power since 2011. "These behaviors have nothing to do with the
nature and mentality of Syrian society," said Abdelbaset Sieda, a
senior member of the main Western- backed Syrian National Coalition.
He said the group had no official confirmation of the stoning cases
although he did not rule it out. "We expect such acts to be carried
out by the Islamic State," he said.
