It sounded
like the most far-fetched propaganda claim - a Syrian rebel commander who cut
out the heart of a fallen enemy soldier, and ate it before a cheering crowd of
his men.
The story
turned out to be true in its most important aspect - a ritual demonstration of
cannibalism - though when I met the commander, Abu Sakkar, in Syria last week,
he seemed hazy on the details.
"I really
don't remember," he says, when I ask if it was the man's heart, as
reported at the time, or liver, or a piece of lung, as a doctor who saw the
video said. He goes on: "I didn't bite into it. I just held it for show."
The video says
otherwise. It is one of the most gruesome to emerge from Syria's civil war. In
it, Abu Sakkar stands over an enemy corpse, slicing into the flesh.
"It looks
like you're carving him a Valentine's heart," says one of his men,
raucously. Abu Sakkar picks up a bloody handful of something and declares:
"We will eat your hearts and your livers you soldiers of Bashar the dog."
Then he brings
his hand up to his mouth and his lips close around whatever he is holding. At
the time the video was released, in May, we rang him and he confirmed to us
that he had indeed taken a ritual bite (of a piece of lung, he said).
Now, meeting
him face-to-face, he seems a bit more circumspect, though his anger builds when
I ask why he carried out this depraved act.
"I didn't
want to do this. I had to," he tells me. "We have to terrify the
enemy, humiliate them, just as they do to us. Now, they won't dare be wherever
Abu Sakkar is."
He is 27, a
stocky, tough-looking Bedouin from the Baba Amr district of Homs, with a wild
stare and skin burned a dark brown by the sun. He tells me the story of his
involvement in the revolution, leading to his current notoriety.
Before the
uprising, he was working as a labourer in Baba Amr. He joined the
demonstrations when they started in the spring of 2011. Then, he says, a woman
and child were shot dead at a protest. His brother went to help. He, too, was
shot and killed.
In a YouTube
video from June 2011, Abu Sakkar can be seen at the front of a crowd waving
olive branches to greet deserting army officers. He took up arms against the
regime, one of the first to join a new organisation called the Free Syrian Army
(FSA).
In February
2012, he was fighting with the Farouq Brigade, and they tried, and failed, to
stop the regime taking Baba Amr. When the FSA fled Baba Amr, he started his own
brigade, the Omar al-Farouq. They saw bitter fighting in Qusayr.
Along the way,
he lost another brother, many relatives, and countless of his men. His parents
were arrested and he says the police rang him so he could hear them being
beaten.
"Put
yourself in my shoes," he says. "They took your father and mother and
insulted them. They slaughtered your brothers, they murdered your uncle and
aunt. All this happened to me. They slaughtered my neighbours."
He goes on to talk about the man whose flesh he
held in his hands: "This guy had videos on his mobile. It showed him
raping a mother and her two daughters. He stripped them while they begged him
to stop in the name of God. Finally he slaughtered them with a knife... What
would you have done?"
Well, perhaps
not make a meal of my enemy, I think. At the time, Abu Sakkar's men greeted
what he did with cries of "God is Great". Now the fighters looking
after him while he recovers from an injury just seem a bit embarrassed.
Abu Sakkar
says the dead soldier was an Alawite or Shiite militiaman. "He was
insulting us. He was shouting, 'Oh Ali, Oh Hussein, Oh Haydar [Shia
slogans],'" he says.
"In the
beginning, when we captured an Alawite fighter, we would feed him, make him
feel comfortable. We used to tell him we were brothers. But then they started
raping our women, slaughtering children with knives."
A man in the
room interrupts to say the Alawites are not proper Muslims. This war is
becoming increasingly sectarian.
Abu Sakkar shows
me scars from 14 different bullet wounds on his body. "We're under siege,
it's been two years now," he says. "Videos from the Shabiha
[government militia] show many more terrible things than what I did. You
weren't too bothered. There wasn't much of a media fanfare. You didn't care.
You suffer a fraction of what we suffered and you'll do what I did and more."
He continues: "Qusayr was destroyed, Baba
Amr destroyed, Homs was entirely destroyed. No-one cares. See how the refugees
are living? Would you accept your parents living the same way? The Syrian
people refuse to be humiliated. We are defending the Islamic nation and this is
how the Arabs and the West treat us? What did the West do? Nothing."
Finally, he
adds: "If we don't get help, a no-fly zone, heavy weapons, we will do
worse [than I did]. You've seen nothing yet."
So Abu Sakkar
has become the "cannibal rebel" - a handy symbol for all those who,
like the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, oppose arming the Syrian rebels.
Standing next
to an uncomfortable looking David Cameron, Mr Putin told a G8 summit news
conference: "These are people who don't just kill their enemies, they open
up their bodies, and eat their intestines in front of the public and the
cameras. Are these the people you want to… supply with weapons?"
It is possible
that Abu Sakkar was mentally disturbed all along. Or perhaps the war made him
this way. War damages men - and Syria is no different. As the poet W H Auden
wrote: "Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return."
I asked the Free Syrian Army's
chief of staff, Gen Salim Idris, why Abu Sakkar hadn't been arrested. His
answer tells you a lot about the reality of how the war is being fought on the
rebel side.
"We
condemn what he did," said the general. "But why do our friends in
the West focus on this when thousands are dying? We are a revolution not a
structured army. If we were, we would have expelled Abu Sakkar. But he commands
his own battalion, which he raised with his own money. Is the West asking me
now to fight Abu Sakkar and force him out of the revolution? I beg for some
understanding here."
Abu
Sakkar seems unsure how to respond to his notoriety. He is, by turns, sheepish,
nervous, angry and bitter. He definitely has the look of a man who has seen too
many bad things. At the end of our interview he says he is an "angel of
death" coming to cash in the souls of the enemy.
After
the video became public, his men filmed him making a statement. (Not for
nothing has this been called the YouTube war.) In
this video, Abu Sakkar is in a freshly pressed uniform, jauntily
smoking a cigarette in a way that lends a slightly absurd air to the whole
performance. He says he's willing to stand trial - but only if President Bashar
Assad does too.
There's
no immediate prospect of either men facing their accusers. Nor of peace talks,
or even of a ceasefire. And so Syria's descent into madness continues.s. Nor of peace talks, or even of a ceasefire. And so
Syria's descent into madness continues.
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