We all saw the horrendous footage showing Khaled Hamad (Abu Sakkar), a Syrian opposition fighter, mutilating the corpse of a Syrian soldier and then removing a part from the body, possibly the man's liver or heart, and putting it in his mouth as through trying to eat it. It was repulsive footage and inhumane behavior by all standards. Some condemned YouTube for allowing such tapes to be shown on its website, while others believed this to be necessary to convey the real image of the atrocities taking place every day in Syria, on all fronts. This is while deceptive diplomatic efforts continue, claiming to look for a solution to this protracted destruction that has broken many records in two years, claiming the lives of more than 100 thousand people. On the other hand, sectarian people found the tape an opportunity to spew their venoms, and dig up the old history of sectarian crimes, since Khaled Hamad was Sunni and the victim was ostensibly Alawi. Under pressure of scenes of this kind, the mind usually stops working, and many questions appear, such as: What could have pushed a man like this fighter to do what he had done? Indeed, according to the media (e.g. the UK newspaper The Independent on Thursday), Hamad was in the vanguard of the protesters in the neighborhood of Baba Amr in Homs when Islamist extremists from al-Nusra Front became involved in the revolution in Syria, chanting against sectarian slogans at the protests, especially those targeting the Alawi community. Hamad believed that the Syrian revolution was against a corrupt regime, and that this had nothing to do with the community to which the head of the regime and his security leaders belonged. How did Abu Sakkar then become that monster whom we saw in the footage on YouTube? Perhaps the more precise question should be: How did the Syrian revolution turn from peaceful protests in Daraa calling for reforming the regime, to this river of blood flowing in Syrian streets every day? Is it acceptable for this tape, horrendous as it may be, to push us to ignore the fact that it was the regime itself and its oppressive apparatuses that dragged the Syrian society to this level of unprecedented violence and killing? Indeed, the regime has spared no neighborhood from its massacres, in many cases sectarian in nature. If the regime's apparatuses were “smarter" than Abu Sakkar, and did not film the way the child Hamza al-Khatib was tortured before his mutilated corpse was sent back to his parents; did not film the beheading of Ibrahim Qashoush and removing his throat after killing him, then throwing his body in the Orontes River after shredding it; did not film how Syrian soldiers danced over the corpses of their victims; did not film how women were raped in Baba Amr, Idlib, and al-Beida; did not film how those fleeing the fighting in Daraa were slaughtered and had their corpses burnt; if we did not see those atrocities on YouTube, then is that a reason for us to consider what Khaled Hamad did, horrendous as it may be, the most brutal and barbaric crime to be committed in Syria? The accounts we read, mostly quoted by foreign journalists who were able to identify Hamad and the Umar Farouk battalion he led in Baba Amr, say that the fighters of this group were the most organized compared to all fighters in the different brigades. The Independent's correspondent, for instance, said that the group had ordered the execution of a foreign fighter, a salafi jihadi, for kidnapping a British journalist. Ian Black, The Guardian's Middle East editor, wrote that one of Hamad's relatives was raped and murdered in Homs by regime forces. He said that Hamad found among the recordings on the phone of the soldier he mutilated a video showing this soldier and a number of his comrades dancing over a naked woman and her naked daughters, and putting sticks into their bodies, before murdering them. None of this justifies what Hamad did. The officials in the Free Syrian Army and other armed groups in the opposition must rise above the acts perpetrated by the regime soldiers. However, the question that remains is this: Who is supposed to be more orderly and disciplined? The soldiers of a regular army, or fighters who came from all parts of Syria and beyond, without having a unified leadership responsible for their movements and capable of keeping their conduct in check?
