Two hostage takings and two very different outcomes. In the Golan Heights, Syrian rebels seized 21 UN peacekeepers who were on a supply mission. The Filipino soldiers were taken at gunpoint by fighters from the Martyrs of Yarmouk militia who demanded that government forces withdraw from the border area before they were released. After negotiations between the UN, Jordan, the Syrian opposition and the Free Syrian Army, who deplored the seizures, the militia agreed to release their captives. However, when a truce agreed between rebels and Syrian government forces, which would have allowed a UN convoy to collect the hostages, broke down, the luckless blue-helmeted soldiers were taken to the Jordanian border by their captors and handed over to the Jordanian authorities. In northern Nigeria the hostage taking had an altogether less pleasant outcome. There a group of militants calling themselves Ansaru, and believed to be part of the fanatical Boko Haram network, have butchered in cold blood, seven foreign construction workers kidnapped from a project in the state of Bauchi where they were working. The luckless men, a Briton, a Greek, an Italian and four Lebanese have perished along with a Nigerian guard who was gunned down when the kidnap attack took place. In the case of the UN peacekeepers seized by the militia, it seems more than likely that the action was a spur of the moment decision by fighters who probably did not understand the significance and value of the UN troops in protecting the border of the Occupied Golan Heights from further incursions by Israelis. The demand that the Syrian government pull out of local areas was probably a face-saving afterthought with absolutely no expectation of having the Assad regime comply. The men from Ansaru by contrast probably knew that they were going to end up murdering the men they had captured. The whole point of the exercise was to stoke up distress and outrage among the families and governments of their victims and then find an excuse to carry out their original murderous threat. That justification took the form of a claim that a rescue mission had been attempted. While the Italian, British and Greek governments denied any such bid, it is perfectly possible that the British, perhaps with the French, had some such scheme involving their special forces. Yet no nation can be blamed for seeking to rescue its nationals from harm's way. It is true that it ought to have been Nigerian forces who undertook this task on their own sovereign territory, but they might have been planning to work with outsiders. However, then again, there may have been absolutely no rescue attempt in the offing. Having paraded their hostages in a ghoulish video, the Ansaru men massacred them and published grainy pictures of the corpses. It is a disturbing mystery to all decent people how anyone claiming to act in the name of Islam can behave so mercilessly. To fight and slay an enemy in battle is a necessity which even the bravest and most decorated of soldiers often regret in their later days. But to lay hands on someone who threatens you not at all, who indeed has come to your country to help build things to make it a better place, to seize such entirely innocent and helpless people and then to murder them in cold blood while the video cameras roll is disgusting and depraved beyond belief.
