The Dark Side of Syria’s Rebels
The Dark Side of Syria’s Rebels
A lot. Syria’s Free Syria Army (FSA), the main military wing in the fight against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, is threatening to execute blogger and critic Anhar Kochneva unless they’re paid a staggering $50 million.
The group said they would kill her last week if they didn’t get the money. No one knows if she’s dead or alive, but the case reveals a strange and suspect side of Syria’s shadow power.
Russia Today’s Maria Finoshina, who met Kochneva several times in Syria, told me by e-mail that Kochneva was known as a vocal critic of the FSA on Russian television as well as social media platforms at the time of her kidnapping in Homs in October.
Kochneva was “what we call very ‘pro’-regime,” Finoshina said. “And never made secret of it.”
The half-Ukrainian, half-Palestinian blogger and commentator was not always “elegant” in her criticism of the FSA, Finoshina said, while the director of Lebanon’s Samir Kasser Foundation said Tuesday even the Ukrainian foreign ministry had stopped calling her a “journalist” in their most recent statements, instead “referring to her as a member of a press/news team.”