Syrian rebel group says it is probing child-beheading video, Reuters reports

Aleppo, July 21: The US-backed Syrian rebel group which has faced a backlash after a video footage showing one of its member beheading a young boy got widely circulated said it is probing the incident, a Reuters report said.

Pictures of the fighter of the group severing the boy's head with a knife on the back of a pick-up truck matched the atrocities committed by the Islamic State (IS), which has meted out similar treatment to several in Syria and Iraq in the last few years.

The victim was seen being taunted by those who held him. They said he was from a palestinian faction which was fighting on behalf of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The captors said the Quds Brigade were sending children since they have run out of men now. They even said the boy was one of the "dogs" of al-Assad.

The Quds Brigade, on the other hand, said on Wednesday (July 20) that the victim was a 12-year-old Palestinian refugee and his name is Abdullah Issa. It said the boy belonged to a poor family which resided in a rebel-occupied area of Alleppo and denied that he was a child soldier, the report said.

The report also added that the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the killers of the boy belong to the Nour al-Din al-Zinki Movement---a rebel group which has been militarily and financially backed by the US and its allies in the past. The support came to an end only in September last year after the movement joined other rebel forces accused of kidnapping foreign-aid workers, according to the Amnesty International, the Huffington Post and Reuters report added.

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