It happened on 8 November 2014 in Rakka, the capital of the "Islamic State." An "Islamic court" consisting of a Tunisian and a Libyan, passed "judgment" on three officers of the Syrian Arab Army.

The three men were sold to the Islamic State by a tribe who had feigned to offer them hospitality during a battle around a gas field.

They were accused of serving an Alawite president, therefore branded as heretics [1], and held to be co-responsible for the bombing carried out by the Syrian Arab Air Force which killed Islamic State fighters and members of their families.

The judges sentenced them to death for being Alawite, while two of them were actually Sunni [2] They decided not to execute the sentence by shooting or decapitation, but instead invited the crowd to trample them.

Several thousand Rakka inhabitants attended this "Islamic trial."

The crowd stomped the officers until their bodies were reduced to a pulp. Then the IS fighters tied their corpses to a motorcycle and dragged them through the streets.

Rakka was once a quiet city renowned for its literature and theater festivals. In 2012, it was sold to Al-Qaeda by local officials. Subsequently, it came under the control of the Islamic State that made it its capital. Jihadists left the city a few days before the US strikes, but returned afterwards. Now, prayer is obligatory five times a day and women can not walk around if they are not veiled and accompanied by a family member.

What happened over these past two years to the minds of the people to make them take part in such a crime?

Syria is in shock. This is the first time since the beginning of the war that a crowd made up of Syrians - and not foreign jihadists - has taken the lives of Syrian soldiers.

In actual fact, the inhabitants of Rakka who took part in the killings, including minors, have been turned into addicts. For two years, the jihadists have been providing them with copies of the Koran and sweets, which are laced with Captagon powder (Fenetylline hydrochloride) [3]. This amphetamine, mixed with hashish, is the mainstay of the treatment dispensed by the jihadists. After two years, part of the population has became sufficiently intoxicated to actively participate in such a crime.

[1] Alawites are the faithful of a true neo-Platonist religion who converted to Shia Islam. They retained some of their original religious beliefs, including reincarnation. They were considered Muslims until the 1980s, during which period the Wahhabi preachers declared the Shiites as heretical. The peculiarity of their theology is to affirm that faith takes precedence over rituals; consequently, they rarely participate in group prayers. In the twentieth century, three fatwas were issued by the Muslim authorities, both Sunni and Shiite, recognizing the Muslim character of the Alawites (the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Hajj Amin el-Hüseyni in 1926, Ayatollah Hassan Mahdi al-Shirazi in 1972, and al-Sayyed Mussa al-Sadr in 1973).

[2] Contrary to Atlanticist and Gulf propaganda claims, about 70% of Syrian troops are Sunni - for the simple reason that the Syrian Arab Army is not the "Army of Bashar", but a conscript army in which the children of all religious communities serve indiscriminately.

[3] “Captagon® is jihadists’ main weapon”, Voltaire Network, 2 April 2014.