The Islamic State(IS) jihadist group has executed one of dozens of Druze hostages abducted from Syria’s southern province of Sweida last week, a journalist in the area and a monitor said Sunday.
IS killed the 19-year-old male student on Thursday after kidnapping more than 30 people, mostly women and children from a village in Sweida during a deadly rampage last week, the head of the Sweida24 news website Nour Radwan told AFP.
Quoting relatives, Radwan, who was speaking from Sweida, said the young man was taken from the village of Al-Shabki on July 25 along with his mother.
His family received two videos, the first showing him being decapitated and the second of him speaking before being killed as well as images of his body after his death, Radwan said.
Sweida24 posted online part of a second video, which was seen by AFP, showing a young man who appeared to be sitting on the ground in a rocky landscape.
He is wearing a black T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms and his hands are tied behind his back.
The video could not be independently verified.
IS has not claimed the kidnappings and did not publish the video on their usual channels.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor, said the young man’s execution was the first since the kidnappings.
The execution came “after the failure of talks between IS and regime forces over the transfer of IS fighters from the southwest of Daraa province to the Badiya” desert, said the Observatory.
It also follows the execution of 50 IS fighters and civilians in Daraa province earlier this week at the hands of rebels, the monitor said.
On Friday, a top Druze religious leader said Syrian regime ally Russia was in talks with the jihadists over the release of those abducted in Sweida.
IS jihadists have lost much of the territory they once controlled in Syria after overruning large swathes of it in 2014, but they retain a presence in the east of the country and in the vast Badiya desert that sweeps through its south.
