ISIS Militant Kills Mother on Group’s Orders, Activists Say

BEIRUT, Lebanon — An Islamic State militant killed his own mother in front of a post office in the northern Syrian city of Raqqa this week, Syrian activists said on Friday, with one monitoring organization adding that the episode began when she tried to persuade him to leave the extremist group.

The fighter, Ali Saqr, 21, killed his mother in front of several hundred people for what the Islamic State called apostasy, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, two groups that monitor the conflict through contacts in Syria.

The act was the latest in a chain of brutal and bizarre killings that the Islamic State uses, and often widely publicizes, in efforts to tamp down dissent and to attract recruits.

from NYT