Women stoned to death for 'adultery' in Syria

A cleric read the verdict before the truck came and dumped a large pile of stones near the municipal garden. Jihadi fighters brought in the woman, clad head to toe in black, and half buried her in the ground.

Then they told residents who had gathered around the scene to carry out the sentence: Stoning to death for the alleged adulteress.None in the crowd stepped forward, said a witness to the event in a northern Syrian city. So the jihadi fighters, mostly foreign extremists, did it themselves, pelting Faddah Ahmad with rocks.'Even when she was hit with stones she did not scream or move,' said an opposition activist who said he witnessed the stoning near the football stadium in Raqqa, the main Syrian stronghold of the Islamic State group.The July 18 stoning was the second in a span of 24 hours. A day earlier, 26-year-old Shamseh Abdullah was killed in a similar way in the nearby town of Tabqa by IS fighters.She was also accused of having sex outside marriage, the Associated Press reports.The killings are believed to be the first of their kind in rebel-held northern Syria, where IS jihadis have seized large swaths of territory, terrorising residents with a strict interpretation of Islamic law, including beheadings and cutting off the hands of thieves.The jihadis recently tied a 14-year-old boy to a cross-like structure and left him for several hours in the scorching summer sun before bringing him down - punishment for not fasting during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.The two cases were first reported by the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which collects information through a network of activists around the country. Bassam Al-Ahmad, a spokesman for the Violations Documentation Centre, a Syrian group that tracks human rights violations, also confirmed the stoning.An activist based in the northern province of Idlib, who collects information from other activists in northern Syria, said Ms Ahmad was a widow.A man who asked to be identified as Asad, a pseudonym, for fear of repercussions, said that in the other stoning, in Tabqa, residents also refused to take part, and that the act was carried out by Islamic State members.The U.S. Embassy in Syria, in a statement posted on its Twitter account, condemned the 'barbaric stoning' of a woman in Tabqa.International human rights groups did not report the stoning, and Human Rights Watch said it had no independent confirmation.'It is a very worrying trend if true,' said Human Rights Watch researcher Lama Fakih.The Islamic State group has 'imposed incredibly restrictive rules on the civilian population which have served to make women and girls particularly vulnerable and to quite clearly discriminate against them,' she said, adding that the reports of the stoning were the first the group had received out of Syria.'This is just a more sort of extreme manifestation of those restrictive rules which are all in violation of international' human rights law, she said. (dailymail.co.uk)Bakudaily.az