The Syrian rebel, Khalid al-Hamad, who reportedly ate part of a pro-government soldier on video explained himself in an interview to TIME over Skype, saying that the brutality of the Syrian regime had driven him to extremes.
"Al-Hamad, who has been fighting on the front lines near the strategic town of al-Qusayr for the past week, said the video captures the first time he had ever attempted to eat an enemy’s liver. He indicated that the brutality of the regime had driven him to extremes. “You are not seeing what we are seeing, and you are not living what we are living. Where are my brothers, my friends, the girls of my neighborhood who were raped? May God bless them all.”
I'd love to report that the video was a fake, but nope.
Apparently, al-Hamad found footage on the dead soldier's cell phone, adding to his anger.
“We opened his cell phone, and I found a clip of a woman and her two daughters fully naked and he was humiliating them, and sticking a stick here and there," he told TIME.
The video of al-Hamad that went viral got a lot of people bent out of shape.
Anyhow, I'm no surgeon, but apparently there was one watching the video.
It turns out that the body part in the video that al-Hamad takes a bite of, is actually a lung, not a heart as many news sites and blogs reported.
"A surgeon who has seen the video confirms that the organ in question was a lung, which somewhat resembles the liver," wrote TIME's Aryn Baker. al-Hamad actually thought he was eating the liver.
You can read more over at TIME.
]]>
