BEIRUT, Lebanon—The teenager’s name was Muhammad al-Qatta, and he was 14 years old when witnesses said radical Islamists in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo pulled him from his coffee kiosk on Sunday and later executed him in a public square.
Muhammad had left his house to close up his kiosk, where his work supported his family, his mother said. When someone approached him looking for a free cup of coffee, the teenager uttered the phrase that cast him among the victims of the war’s growing depravity.
“He was talking to this guy and told him, ‘I don’t want to lend you anything,’ ” the teenager’s father quoted him as saying.
“If Muhammad, peace be upon him, were to come to this earth right now, I would still not lend a cup of coffee to anyone unless they pay for it,” the teenager said.
Three men with long hair, wearing long beards and the robes favored by ultraconservatives, overheard the exchange. They accused the teenager of insulting the prophet, told him to leave the kiosk and then took him away in the car. When they returned an hour later, Muhammad bore the marks of a beating. In a square, they covered his head with his shirt, a makeshift blindfold, as if he were “some big shot,” his mother said.
She watched from her balcony, as hundreds of people gathered around. A resident of the neighborhood, Abu Abdo, heard what the men said. Addressing the “respected people of Aleppo,” they warned that cursing God or the Prophet Muhammad was a sin, saying it would be “punished this way.”
The teenager’s father heard the shots. His wife told him that the men had killed their son.
“His blood ran in front of me,” Muhammad’s mother, said in a grim video posted on the Internet on Monday. In her anguish, she invoked the name of another teenage victim in Syria, Hamza Ali al-Khateeb, whose death at the hands of government forces helped propel the uprising, now a war in its third year. He was pulled aside two years ago by government agents at a protest, brutalized and killed before being sent back to his family.
Just as Hamza’s death crystallized the rage against President Bashar al-Assad, Muhammad’s killing stoked similar feelings against a new power that has emerged during the war. It focused anger on hard-line Islamists, including foreigners, some of whom have seized on the conflict in Syria as an opportunity to impose their mores. For Muhammad’s mother and some her neighbors, the tyrannies were indistinguishable, trapping many Syrians in a vise.
In a home in Muhammad’s neighborhood, Mr. Abu Abdo said what had happened to the two boys was “the same.”
“Who kills a teen, whatever the reason is, is a killer,” he said, adding that Syrians were looking for life without the government’s security thugs “or radical Sunnis who raise black flags, and want to build a state not fit for our minds.”
There is growing anger at the small but assertive cadre of extremists who have joined the rebel ranks, and whose hard-line beliefs have unsettled even pious Syrians. Their influence is being felt in mosques, in schools and in committees and courts intended to enforce a strict version of Islamic law. Disgust with the radicals has peaked in recent months after reports of summary executions, including of government soldiers and men accused of crimes and then punished.
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