SKY NEWS IS THE PROPAGANDA WING OF THE SYRIAN AL QAEDA REBS

Sky News has consistently been anti-Assad and pro-reb. Yesterday its propaganda was a story on a woman joining the rebs. Today it is showing a video that was posted online of the apparent execution of four members of the Shabiha in Aleppo. The video is very violent. It does not explicitly show the execution but little is left to the imagination. Four men looking bloodied and battered are dragged out of a building, made to kneel down and then constant automatic gun fire is heard for a minute or so. The video does not show the four men being shot but the sounds imply that many many bullets are fired into their bodies.

Graphic new footage has emerged that it is claimed shows rebel soldiers in Syria lining up and shooting dead pro-government milita members.

The two-minute video seems to show members of the Shabiha, a militia group aligned to President Bashar al Assad's regime, being killed. They appear to be unarmed.

[source : Syrian Rebels 'Kill Pro-Regime Militia', Sky News, http://news.sky.com/story/967391/syrian-rebels-kill-pro-regime-militia, 01/08/2012]

Throughout the report the rebs carry AK47s and shout "Allah U Akbar!".

So what is the propaganda value in this report?

First, if the video is real then it is a warning to the pro-Assad forces that this is their fate.

Second, we are asked to sympathise with such barbarity through this statement:

Sky correspondent Alex Rossi, reporting from the Syria-Turkey border, said the Shabiha are "feared and reviled in equal measure".

"They are blamed for things like the Houla massacre on May 25 in which 108 people were killed, 49 of them children.

"It would be understandable why, in the heat of war, they may be killed in this way. Certainly the Geneva convention doesn't hold much sway in this conflict.

But we all know that Houla was carried by the terrorists and covered up by the FSA who even pressured children into telling lies!