“Many fighters from ISIL and other radical Sunni Islamist groups in Syria deem Shi’ites as infidels and consider their shrines idolatrous, and therefore legitimate targets,” Reuters reports blandly, without noting that to consider someone an infidel and his shrine idolatrous does not necessarily require one to think that that person and shrine are “legitimate targets” — unless, of course, one’s religion requires violence against infidels and their shrines, a fact that Reuters, like the rest of the mainstream media, does its best to obscure.
“Islamists bomb Shi’ite shrine in eastern Syria: activists,” from Reuters, March 26:
BEIRUT (Reuters) – Islamist fighters from an al Qaeda splinter group bombed a large Shi’ite Muslim shrine in the eastern Syrian city of Raqqa on Wednesday, activists said.
The mosque of Ammar bin Yassir and Oweis al-Qarni was once a destination for Shi’ite Muslim pilgrims from Iran, Lebanon and Iraq before it was taken over a year ago by Sunni rebels battling to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad.
One photo posted on Twitter on Wednesday under the heading “the pagan Iranian shrine” showed extensive damage to the exterior walls and roof of the site, a turquoise and white complex of domes and minarets centred around a tiled courtyard.
Another picture showed concrete and twisted metal strewn on the street outside the mosque – built under Assad’s rule with support from Shi’ite Iran – while another showed an interior wall that had collapsed inward.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said the al Qaeda splinter group Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) had set off two powerful explosions at the mosque early on Wednesday.
Many fighters from ISIL and other radical Sunni Islamist groups in Syria deem Shi’ites as infidels and consider their shrines idolatrous, and therefore legitimate targets….