MOSCOW, October 17 (RIA Novosti) - Islamic State (IS) militants have crucified a 17-year old boy and displayed his body on a cross in Syria, for taking photos of the IS military bases and accepting 500 Turkish lira (about $222) for any footage, The Independent reported Friday.
Based on a message shown on a banner attached to the teenager’s chest by the militants, seen in pictures that have been shared on the internet, the boy was “killed and crucified for a period of three days” as his punishment, according to the newspaper.
“Crucifixion has been used many times before, it’s an age-old punishment dealt out to people who have committed treason,” Charlie Winter, Programs Officer at counter-extremism think tank the Quilliam Foundation told The Independent, adding that it arose from the IS fundamentalist interpretation of a verse from the Koran. The verse says that, “indeed, the penalty for those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and strive upon earth [to cause] corruption is none but that they be killed or crucified or that their hands and feet be cut off from opposite sides or that they be exiled from the land.”
Earlier in June, the IS crucified nine other people in a Syrian village, with one managing to survive, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The men were said to be rebels fighting against both Syrian President Bashar Assad and any jihadist groups.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights also reported on Thursday that the group beheaded its own militants, accused of spying and “banditry and robbing Muslims’ money”.
The IS, a brutal Sunni group of some 30,000 fighters that controls a vast Sunni-majority zone straddling the Iraq-Syria border, continues to make gains in northern Syria and Iraq's desert western province of Anbar.
The group, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), has fought the Syrian government since 2012. It extended attacks to north and west Iraq in June and declared the creation of an Islamic caliphate.
In August, the United States started conducting airstrikes on IS positions in Iraq, extending the airstrikes to Syria in September, when an international anti-IS coalition was formed, currently comprising more than 60 countries.
