Syrian rebels linked to Al Qaeda apologized for mistakenly beheading the wrong man and have asked for "understanding and forgiveness," Fox News reported.
Members of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham previously posted a video online of a fighter holding the head of someone who they thought was a supporter of Syrian President Bashar Assad in front of a crowd in Aleppo.
However, the head was immediately recognized as belonging to Mohammed Fares, a member of Ahrar al-Sham -- a group that regularly fights along the Islamic State of Iraq.
Omar al-Qahtani, a spokesman for the Islamic State of Iraq, claimed Fares believed he had been captured by pro-Assad militants and subsequently asked them to kill him. However, al-Qahtani said Allah would forgive the fighters for the mistake, referencing a story in the Quran where a believer kills a man in error.
According to a report in military journal Jane's Defense Weekly, groups like the Islamic State of Iraq have "expanded their influence significantly in 2013," being joined by a record number of international fighters.
In a recent interview, Raffaello Pantucci, a senior research fellow at Britain's Royal United Services Institute, said "their final goal is to create an Islamic Emirate which becomes a piece of territory which they control. And from there they will start to export jihad everywhere else."
More than 120,000 people have died as a result of the Syrian civil war and more than 1 million have been displaced. Following a threat of a drone strike from the Obama administration, Assad agreed to give up all of his chemical weapons to Russia over a period of time.
Russian officials said President Vladimir Putin recently spoke to Assad on the phone and "emphasized efforts taken by Russia together with its partners to prepare a Geneva-2 international conference and gave a positive assessment of Bashar Assad's readiness to send a Syrian government delegation there."
