ISIS Triumphant in Atrocity

"Stop circulating false news."
"They are driving our soldiers like a herd of sheep."
"[The Assad government is] a filthy failure that has destroyed the country's trees and people and allowed ISIS to rise."
Comments on Syrian pro-government Facebook page

Syrian soldiers, dispatched to the area in a column, arriving nearby to the Taqba airbase in Raqqa province, to come to the aid of other Syrian troops who were fighting ISIS jihadis determined to control the airbase, and in the process became victims themselves when they were taken prisoner by the terrorists. "We ambushed them and arrested them", said a Lebanese ISIS fighter, Yousef.

IAFPG/Getty Images

Yousef said through an interview on the Internet that the ISIS fighters had forced the 120 soldiers to run about in the desert, the plan being to exhaust them physically. They were then locked into an interior where they were beaten. "Then we took them out and shot them", he said. Videos posted online by ISIS supporters gave a miserable hint of the soldiers' final hours alive.

In one of the videos, the prisoners are seen running in a line through a stretch of desert while bearded ISIS fighters stood laughing, and herding them like sheep.
"The state of Islam!" shouted the fighters, repeating a common ISIS slogan.
The soldiers were forced to respond with: "It remains." 
Quite the triumphantly punishing ritual. One the prisoners would not live to tell their grandchildren about.

 IAFPG/Getty Images

There was the video with its images of jihadist terrorists taunting the humiliated soldiers who wore nothing but their undershorts, their military uniforms stripped away. Marching the men through the desert, then lining them up and gunning them down. The entire deadly-maleficent episode duly filmed and posted on the Internet to entertain and invite other like-minded jihadis to come and join in the fun and games.

Thus came to an end the battle for control of the Taqba airbase in Raqqa province as the terrorists took control of the base. Some of the Syrian communities that have supported President Bashar Al-
Assad in the past three years of civil war may be re-thinking their position. The government, through the state news agency SANA, reported, when the base fell to the ISIS jihadis that troops had withdrawn from the base, regrouped, and were successfully fighting close by.

After a pro-government Facebook page posted a video of the captured soldiers being marched through the desert, and another one showing their dead bodies, the comments from viewers were contemptuous of the government on the one hand, and disbelieving that the event had ever occurred. One comment addressed the regime's press office, that it had promised to "do everything necessary to follow up on the shortcomings that have led to the loss of a number of areas and a large number of martyrs for the homeland."

This is the regime that did nothing, when it still could -- in the early days when ISIS moved over from Iraq into Syria -- to control it. At that time the regime felt that ISIS could be useful in helping it fight the Syrian Free Army. Which is what ISIS did, before deciding to head back to Iraq and take Mosul and a growing swath of territory, then tracked back to Syria and did the same there. And now is threatening the Alawite Baathist regime.

The Iraqi Sunni ISIS agents of death confronting the Shiite Alawite Syrians content enough to deliver their Sunni Syrian counterparts to torture, starvation, chemical attacks, and death.