“The man had been accused of ‘insulting the Prophet Mohammad and his family,’ said the Britain-based monitoring group. That makes it likely that Mohammad al-Mir was a Shi’ite, as Muhammad’s child bride Aisha was an antagonist of Ali ibn Abi Talib, the Shi’ite standard bearer. Shi’ites thus sometimes denigrate Aisha — and Sunnis Ali.
“Nusra Front executes Syrian for ‘insulting prophet,'” Agence France Presse, November 26, 2014:
BEIRUT: Al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch Wednesday executed a man it accused of insulting the Prophet Mohammad, in a summary killing mirroring those by ISIS, activists said Wednesday.
Nusra Front militants shot dead the civilian, identified as Mohammad al-Mir, in the town of Irbin, just northeast of the capital Damascus, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The man had been accused of “insulting the Prophet Mohammad and his family,” said the Britain-based monitoring group.
Nusra has regularly executed members of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime, but has rarely been accused of carrying out such killings on religious grounds.
It pledged allegiance to Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri in April, distancing itself from the Sunni extremist ISIS notorious for summarily executing those it accuses of apostasy.
“We are all used to seeing ISIS doing this, but now it seems that other groups like Al-Nusra Front are following in their footsteps, and are terrorizing the population,” Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.
In December 2013, ISIS jihadis executed a Syrian boy accused of blasphemy, sparking protests in the northern city of Aleppo and condemnation from activists and Assad’s opponents….