Syrian star footballer turned rebel dies battling Assad forces

Abdel Basset al-Sarout, a Syrian soccer player turned fighter, has died after receiving injuries while battling forces of the Syrian government in the northwest, Reuters reported citing his faction on Saturday.

The 27-year-old Sarout, who was once a well-known goalie from the city of Homs, gained a new kind of popularity when the uprising against the rule of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad broke out in March 2011.

Sarout was called the “singer of the revolution” for chanting songs that glorified slain protesters or vilified Assad at opposition rallies.

He took up arms against Assad’s government and became a wanted man following the Syrian President’s iron-fisted crackdown on protests by the opposition.

His path was an example that showed how the rebellion turned into an armed struggle deemed as a fight to the death as much by Damascus as by the guerrilla bands spawned by the conflict, Reuters said.

A commander in the Jaish al-Izza rebel faction, Sarout, lost his life two days after sustaining wounds in battle in the northern Hama countryside.

Ceremony in Hatay

Turkish news portal Gazete Duvar reported on Sunday that a funeral ceremony was held for Sarout in a mosque in the Reyhanli district of the Hatay border province before he was sent to Syria.

It was also said in the report that the cloth draped over Sarout’s coffin attracted attention in Turkey due to the words “Hatay Metropolitan Municipality” written on it.

Sarout was on Sunday moved from a hospital in Turkey, which supports the opposition, across the border to the Syrian town of al-Dana with a convoy of cars and motorcycles coming after the coffin.

Rebels from Sarout’s Jaish al-Izza faction fired into the air as crowds stood on the roofs to watch his body being carried through the town.

According to Reuters, men including fighters in combat uniform got down on their knees to pray in front of his body with some of them shedding tears.

On Sunday thousands of people attended the funeral of Sarout, who became an icon of the revolt against Bashar al-Assad.

Four of his brothers and his father have also been killed in the fighting. 

In recent years, military forces of Assad have reclaimed much of Syria by crushing bastions of the rebels with the support of Iran and Russia.

Hundreds of thousands of civilians and insurgents, including Sarout, were shuttled to the northwest under withdrawal deals as the Syrian army reconquered their hometowns.

Following a two-year siege, Sarout was evacuated from Homs under such a deal in 2014. He was fighting government forces in his home city before that.

In 2015, Sarout denied in a video that he had switched his allegiance to Islamic State (ISIS) after he was accused of that due to the infighting and the growing influence of Muslim jihadists on rebel factions.

In 2014, ISIS declared a self-proclaimed “caliphate” took control of large parts of Syria and Iraq. However, it has since collapsed.

It was defeated in Iraq by government forces that had the backing of Iranian supported militias, while in Syria the predominantly Kurdish Syrian Defence Forces, backed by the US put an end to the “caliphate”.

A number of terror attacks carried out by ISIS in Turkey from 2015 to 2016. The caliphate’s last gruesome attack in the country killed 39 people in an exclusive Istanbul night club in 2017.

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from IPA NEWS https://ipa.news/2019/06/10/syrian-star-footballer-turned-rebel-dies-battling-assad-forces/