...For centuries, Aleppo was Greater Syria's largest city and the Ottoman Empire's third, after Constantinople and Cairo. Although relatively close to Damascus in distance, Aleppans regard Damascenes as country cousins...
Countryside" on Thursday claimed that 11 Lebanese pilgrims kidnapped in Syria on May 22 are in the group's custody and that they are in good health.
A statement carrying the group's signature and sent to Qatar-based satellite news channel Al-Jazeera
... an Arab news network headquartered in Qatar, notorious for carrying al-Qaeda press releases. The name means the Peninsula,as in the Arabian Peninsula. In recent years it has settled in to become slightly less biased than MSNBC, in about the same category as BBC or CBS...
said negotiations to release the abductees "would only be possible after (Hizbullah chief Sayyed Hassan) Nasrallah apologizes for his latest speech."
The TV network also aired images of the abductees' passports, saying they were sent by the group.
"We have decided to keep the Lebanese abductees after we learned that some of them are involved in the crimes and massacres committed by the regime and they are currently under interrogation," a man who identified himself as Abu Abdullah al-Halabi, the group's front man, told Al-Jazeera.
"Our message to Nasrallah is that it is prohibited to enter Syria and shed the blood of Syrians," al-Halabi added.
"Our problem is not with any particular community but with those who assist in the suppression of the uprising," the statement said, in allusion to the 15-month revolt against the regime of Syrian Hereditary President-for-Life Bashir
Pencilneckal-Assad
One of the last of the old-fashioned hereditary iron-fisted fascist dictators...
.