The murder of the young Syrian activist took place close enough to his family’s home that his youngest brother heard his piercing scream. Ibrahim Abdelqader’s attackers stabbed him dozens of times and left his partially decapitated corpse hanging from a doorframe.
His family and colleagues say he was killed by a secret operative from the Islamic State group who befriended him before he struck. The message from IS was clear: Its enemies are not safe, even across borders.
More than a month after the slaying of Abdelqader and his friend Fares Hamadi, the media collective that Abdelqader belonged to — which secretly documents life at the heart of the Islamic State group’s self-proclaimed caliphate — has been forced into deep hiding.
IS claimed responsibility for the murders in a video message warning that “every apostate will be slaughtered silently.” It was a grim riff on the media collective’s name — Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently, a reference to the Syrian city of Raqqa that has become synonymous with IS and its efforts to build a caliphate.
Last month, the activist media group collected the 2015 Committee to Protect Journalists’ International Press Freedom Award for its work in one of the most terrifying cities of the world, monitoring IS and countering its steady stream of propaganda with factual accounts.
Their reports from Raqqa have tackled everything from the conscription of children to the sexual slavery of Yazidi women brought from Iraq. They have documented public killings, flagged the death of Western hostages, and tracked the bombs dropped by the Syrian regime, the US, France and Russia.
Now the Oct. 29 killings of Abdelqader and Hamadi raise concerns about the safety of anti-IS activists in Turkey, a country that only recently grasped the scale of the terror threat within its own borders.
The killings extended the reach of the campaign IS already wages against the collective. In the mosques of Raqqa, Friday sermons regularly feature diatribes against the activists. IS killed three men this year that it accused of belonging to the network, although members said they actually were the father and friends of activists. On Wednesday, an activist with the group, Ahmed Mohamed al-Mousa was killed in the northwest Syrian province of Idlib by masked assailants.
AP
