BEIRUT – A cleric read the verdict before the truck came and dumped a large pile of stones near the municipal garden. Jihadi fighters then brought in the woman, clad head to toe in black, and put her in a small hole in the ground. When residents gathered, the fighters told them 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 stones until her body was dragged away.
“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 and the Bajaa garden in the city of Raqqa.
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. Both were accused of having sex outside marriage.
The killings were the first of their kind in rebel-held northern Syria.
The stonings in Syria last month were not widely publicized at the time, but in the following days, three photographs appeared online which appeared to document the grisly spectacle and were consistent with other AP reporting.
The pictures posted on a newly-created Twitter account showed dozens of people gathered in a square, a cleric reading a verdict through a loudspeaker and several bearded men with automatic rifles either carrying or collecting stones.
“A married woman being stoned in the presence of some believers,” read the caption of the photographs on the Twitter account, which has since been suspended.
Abu Ibrahim Raqqawi, the activist who witnessed Ahmad’s stoning, said locals where angry to see foreign fighters impose their will on the community.
“People were shocked and couldn’t understand what was going on. Many were disturbed by the idea that Saudis and Tunisians were issuing (such) orders,” he said in an interview via Skype. Ahmad, he said, appeared unconscious, and he had overheard that she was earlier taken to a hospital where she was given anesthesia.
The stoning took place after dark, he said, at about 11 p.m. He could not see blood on the body because of the black clothes she was wearing. Ahmad did not scream or shake and died silently.
“They then took the dead body in one of their cars and left,” he said.
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 Center, 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 Ahmad was a widow. A man who asked to be identified as Asad for fear of repercussions, said in the other stoning, in Tabqa, residents also refused to take part, and the act was carried out by jihadi fighters.
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.
