In a rickety office building once used by agricultural engineers in the village of Hazano, rebels with the Missiles of Justice militia waited to hear word of negotiations about a hostage swap that night.
Sitting at an old metal desk, a Sunni Muslim rebel named Mustafa manned a phone, waiting for new reports of kidnappings. He had started a list of missing Sunnis in a notebook, including a young man in a white Mazda and a pharmacist.
The list didn’t include the names of the Shiite Muslim hostages the rebels were holding in a building somewhere in the village.
Civilians have gotten caught up in a chilling kidnapping racket in Syria’s northwestern Idlib province. As the uprising against President Bashar Assad becomes increasingly sectarian, Sunnis and Shiites here are rushing to collect hostages as bargaining chips.
Sunnis blame Shiites for supporting the brutal Shiite-allied regime, and Shiites fear what could happen to them if the uprising succeeds. The killings and distrust have shattered decades of peaceful coexistence, raising the specter of the type of sectarian war in neighboring Iraq that has long terrified many Syrians.
Days before, a Shiite shepherd from the nearby village of Fuaa had been kidnapped, along with his flock. (Those hearing the news all asked the same question, as dark humor takes hold here: Were the sheep Shiite or Sunni?)
“When the shepherd was taken, he wasn’t taken because he did anything wrong; he was taken as a matter of numbers because of the people they had from us,” Mustafa said. “This isn’t in our nature, but we were forced to do it to gather a number that we can negotiate with.”
The cycle of tit-for-tat sectarian kidnappings has taken root as the uprising enters its second year.
In recent days, there appears to have been a respite in the abductions, as the country is gripped by a shaky cease-fire violated daily. But previous lulls haven’t lasted.
The regime’s intensified offensive in the days leading up to the cease-fire only heightened the animosity. Even if the peace plan ends the crackdown and ushers in political dialogue, the sectarian tension is likely to remain.
Sunni rebels in Idlib don’t acknowledge their role in the tension, saying they occupy the moral high ground in the battle against Assad, a member of the Alawite sect, a small offshoot of Shiite Islam.
“In every conflict there are two sides, and on both there is right and wrong, but on our side there is more right,” said Abu Mohammad, whose home in Atarib, a village in the Aleppo suburbs under bombardment for more than a month, had just been burned by soldiers. “Anybody who is in Bashar’s ranks or supports Bashar is in the wrong and we are going to fight him.”
They called him the “ambassador of Fuaa,” but that didn’t save him from being kidnapped by residents from the Shiite village last month.
Abdulaziz, a 35-year-old Sunni civil engineer, had friends and colleagues in Fuaa, and two months ago when kidnappings began in the area, he became an intermediary, helping to negotiate releases and trades.
A few weeks ago, he was driving from his Sunni village, Binnish, to another town for work. He traveled along a dirt road through a farm field, a commonly used detour now that the main roads and highways have become fraught with checkpoints and the risk of kidnapping, shootings and shelling from nearby tanks.
He didn’t realize he had driven upon a hidden checkpoint until he heard the first gunshot and a bullet struck his pickup truck. He slammed on the brakes.
Suddenly 10 armed men descended on the truck and pulled him out. He was blindfolded and taken to their village, even though a few of the young men recognized him.
“They said, ‘You have helped us a lot but we have no choice; we have to take you,’” Abdulaziz recounted the morning after his release as well-wishers came by to welcome him home and laugh at the irony.
He was held for a day before being released with more than a dozen other Sunni hostages in exchange for about 30 Shiites held by rebels.
LA Times
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