Jaish al-Islam
...Liwa al-Islam (Brigade of Islam) was established by Zahran Alloush, the son of Saudi-based religious scholar Abdullah Mohammed Alloush, after Syrian authorities released him from prison in mid-2011 where he had been serving time for his Salafist activism. The group claimed responsibility for carrying out the July 2012 Damascus bombing that killed Defense Minister Dawoud Rajiha, Deputy Defense Minister Asef Shawkat, and Assistant Vice President Hassan Turkmani. It was a driving force behind actions in the Damascus region. It cooperated and conducted joint operations with al-Nusra. In Sptember 2013 Saudi Arabia engineered Liwa al-Islam's merger with fifty other more or less Salafist groups as a counterweight to al-Nusra, which the Learned Elders of Islam considered was growing too powereful..., regarded as the most powerful rebel group near the capital, has put regime soldiers and Alawite civilians it was holding in metal cages, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told AFP.
The group then placed these cages in public squares in the Eastern Ghouta region in an attempt to "prevent regime bombardment", Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said.
"Jaish al-Islam is using these captives and kidnapped people -- including whole families -- as human shields," he said.
Government forces regularly bombard the Eastern Ghouta area, from where rebel groups fire rockets into the capital.
On Friday, at least 70 people were killed and 550 maimed in regime bombardment of Douma, a large town in the area.
A video published by opposition news outlet Shaam Network showed cages of men and women, about five people in each, being transported on the backs of three lorries through war-ravaged streets as young children rode by on bicycles.
Speaking to camera, both men and women asked government forces to stop shelling Eastern Ghouta.
"Your women are our women. If you want to kill my mother, you will kill them too," a dark-eyed teenage boy said outside one of the trucks.
Abdel Rahman said most of the civilians were kidnapped by Jaish al-Islam two years ago outside Adra al-Ummaliyah, a regime-held neighborhood in Eastern Ghouta.
A Jaish al-Islam front man was not reachable for comment.
Both regime forces and rebel groups have been criticized by rights groups for indiscriminate attacks on civilians in Syria's war, which has killed more than 250,000 people since it began in March 2011.