Is this amputation somehow more terrible because it was live-tweeted? Amputation of the hand for theft is prescribed in the Qur’an, and these Syrian jihadis have made abundantly clear their determination to impose the Sharia in Syria. So it would be more surprising if they didn’t amputate hands for theft, and not surprising at all that they would do so proudly and openly. They are, after all, implementing the perfect law of Allah.
“Syrian extremists amputated a man’s hand and live-tweeted it,” by Liz Sly and Ahmed Ramadan for the Washington Post, February 28 (thanks to Pamela Geller):
The apparent amputation (Twitter)
The extremist Syrian group deemed too radical even for al-Qaeda performed what may have been a Twitter first Friday: live-tweeting the amputation of a hand.
The amputation took place in the remote rural town of Maskanah in the northern province of Aleppo, according to a series of tweets posted by the account of a supporter of the extremist Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
The first showed a photograph of a blindfolded man having his arm positioned on a table by fighters as a masked man wielding a sword waits nearby. Another man, wearing a white robe of the kind favored in Arab Gulf countries, is reading a statement. A caption states that the blindfolded man is a thief who had asked to have his hand cut off “in order to cleanse his sins.”
A second photograph was taken just as the sword is about to strike the hand while a burly fighter restrains the victim.
A third picture posted an hour later is too graphic to show here. The man appears to be passed out, with his bloodied arm and his severed hand resting on the table. Fresh slashes in the wood suggest it took four swipes of the sword to cut the hand off.
[UPDATE: The Twitter account that posted the photos, @reyadiraq, has been suspended. When asked why, a Twitter spokesperson said the company doesn’t comment on individual accounts and pointed to the rules and media policy. A screengrab of the first photo is at the top of this post. The account had about 96,000 followers and more than 20,000 tweets before suspension.]
ISIS evolved from the al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamic State of Iraq, which U.S. forces battled to contain before they withdrew in 2011. The group’s attempts to impose strict interpretations of Islamic law on the parts of rebel-held northern Syria under its control have earned it many enemies….
Amputation of the hand for theft is not a “strict interpretation of Islamic law.” It is in the Qur’an: “[As for] the thief, the male and the female, amputate their hands in recompense for what they committed as a deterrent [punishment] from Allah . And Allah is Exalted in Might and Wise.” (5:38)