1. The Al Qaeda affiliate ISIS is making more friends in Syria. Two of its folks found a wounded man in his hospital bed and under anesthesia. He was babbling something that the ISIS folks understood to be some Shia religious slogans. They beheaded him and publicly showed off his head (video).
Fighters from the Syrian Sunni-Islamist gang Ahrar ash-Shams, which like ISIS fights against the Syrian government, recognized the chopped off head as having once belonged to one of their fighters, Mohhamad Fares Marroush. They were not amused. How were they supposed to bury him and send him to heaven without the head?
An ISIS sheik admitted that the killing was a mistake but that it should not be punished because the killers had shown good intentions. The Ahrar ash-Sham folks disagree and put out a wanted poster to find and punish the killers.
This will surely boost moral for the next fight both these two groups will be involved in.
2. In other Syria news former VIA agent Philip Giraldi reports that some CIA agents and analysts had threatened to resign over the Sarin use accusations against the Syrian government:
In a scenario unfortunately reminiscent of the lead up to Iraq, the National Security Council tasked the various intelligence agencies to beat the bushes and come up with more corroborative information. Israel obligingly provided what was reported to be interceptions of telephone conversations implicating the Syrian army in the attack, but it was widely believed that the information might have been fabricated by Tel Aviv, meaning that bad intelligence was being used to confirm other suspect information, a phenomenon known to analysts as “circular reporting.” Other intelligence cited in passing by the White House on the trajectories and telemetry of rockets that may have been used in the attack was also somewhat conjectural and involved weapons that were not, in fact, in the Syrian arsenal, suggesting that they were actually fired by the rebels. Also, traces of Sarin were not found in most of the areas being investigated, nor on one of the two rockets identified. Whether the victims of the attack suffered symptoms of Sarin was also disputed, and no autopsies were performed to confirm the presence of the chemical.
We had called the "Sarin attack" on August 21 a false-flag attack immediately after it happened. We also pointed out that the reports of the rocket trajectories and Sarin traces were inconsistent with the conclusions Human Rights Watch and the NYT drew from them. It is somewhat nice to know that the CIA analysts came to the same conclusion.
3. In a speech yesterday Hizbullah chief Nasrallah promised that his forces would keep on fighting in Syria against the Takfiri fighters who kill Shia, Christians and Sunni people alike. As there are little reports over burials of Hizbullah fighters in Lebanon I assume that the numbers involved are rather small but could be increased should the need arise. They will be a welcome addition to the Syrian army's numbers and capabilities.