Anger in Turkey over ISIL video of soldiers burned alive

Video released a day after 16 Turkish soldiers were killed in a series of attacks around ISIL-held Syrian town of AL Bab.

Turkish soldiers stand in an army tank driving back to Turkey from the Syrian border town of Jarabulus on September 2, 2016, soon after Turkish forces entered Syria for the first time in the country’sShow more

Beirut // Turks reacted angrily on Friday after a video released by ISIL that purportedly shows two captured Turkish soldiers being burned alive, although there was no comment from the government.

The 19-minute video posted on extremist websites shows two uniformed men being hauled from a cage before being bound and torched. Despite difficulty in accessing some sites, especially Twitter and Facebook, the video was widely discussed among internet users in Turkey, with one describing it as a “nightmare”.

The video was supposedly shot in the ISIL-declared “Aleppo Province” in northern Syria, where Turkish troops and Turkey-backed Syrian rebels are trying to recapture the town of Al Bab from the extremist group.

Turkish air strikes on the town killed at least 88 civilians since Thursday, including 24 children, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Friday.

The raids followed the deaths of 16 Turkish soldiers in ISIL attacks on Wednesday, the heaviest casualties suffered by Ankara’s forces in one day since its incursion into Syria in late August.

According to the pro-government news agency Anadolu, Turkish police arrested 31 people suspected of links with ISIL on Friday and were hunting for 10 more. It was not clear if the arrests were linked to the video.

Speaking in Turkish, the killer of the two soldiers in the video criticised Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan and called for “destruction to be sowed” in Turkey.

The two soldiers are first shown in a cage, chained back-to-back as two other armed men in ISIL garb stand outside. The soldiers are then forced to walk on all fours to an open field, still chained, and are then burned alive via a fire that starts at the end of their chains.

The video was shared on Twitter by the SITE Intel Group, which monitors extremist social media. Turkish authorities blocked access to Twitter, Facebook and YouTube immediately after the video became public. Access to social media websites was restored Friday morning, with noticeable slowing.

Before being burned, the two victims gave their names in Turkish as Fethi Sahin, born in Konya in central Turkey and Sefter Tas, a 21-year-old serving in Kilis in the south-east.

According to Turkish media, a soldier by the name of Sefter Tas was kidnapped by ISIL on September 1 last year, but Ankara never confirmed the capture. The Turkish army however did confirm last month it had lost contact with two of its troops in Syria and the ISIL-linked propaganda website Amaq had claimed they were captured by the extremists.

* Agence France-Presse and Bloomberg