Brutality of some rebels illustrates U.S. risks

By The New York Times  • 




“For fifty years, they are companions to corruption,” he said. “We swear to the Lord of the Throne, that it is an oath: We will take revenge.”

The moment the poem ended, the commander, known as “the Uncle,” fired a bullet into the back of the first prisoner’s head. His gunmen followed suit, killing all the men at their feet.


As the United States debates whether to support the Obama administration’s proposal that Syrian forces be attacked for using chemical weapons against civilians, this video, shot in April, joins a growing body of evidence of an increasingly criminal environment populated by gangs of highwaymen, kidnappers and killers.

The video also offers a reminder of the foreign-policy puzzle the United States faces in finding rebel allies as some members of Congress press for more-robust military support for the opposition.

In the two-plus years of this civil war, a large part of the Syrian opposition has formed a loose command structure that has found support from several Arab nations and, to a more-limited degree, the West. Other elements of the opposition have assumed an extremist cast, and openly allied with al-Qaida.


Abdul Samad Issa, 37, the rebel in the video, illustrates that risk.

Known in northern Syria as “the Uncle” because two of his deputies are his nephews, Issa leads a relatively unknown group of fewer than 300 fighters, one of his former aides said. The former aide, who smuggled the video out of Syria, is not being identified for security reasons.

A trader and livestock herder before the war, Issa formed a fighting group early in the uprising by using his own money to buy weapons and underwrite the fighters’ expenses.


In Washington yesterday, Secretary of State John Kerry addressed the issue of radicalized rebels in an exchange with Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas. Kerry insisted, “There is a real moderate opposition that exists.” He said there are 70,000 to 100,000 “oppositionists.” Of these, he said, 15 to 20 percent are “bad guys” or extremists.

McCaul responded by saying he had been told in briefings that half of the opposition fighters are extremists.


Issa’s father was opposed to President Hafez Assad, the father of Syria’s current president. He disappeared in 1982, according to Issa’s accounts.

Issa, the aide said, believes his father was killed during a 27-day government crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood known as the Hama Massacre.

When the uprising against Bashar Assad started, people who know Issa said, he was a protester, and then he led fighters in small skirmishes. By last year he was running a training camp in the highlands near Turkey. By this year, the aide said, he was gathering weapons from relatives and Arab businessmen and, at least once, from the Western-supported Supreme Military Council of the Free Syrian Army, the rebel forces.