Robin Williams has inspired Syrian rebels fighting both the Assad government and the Islamic extremists establishing a repressive religious regime across a wide swath of Syria and Iraq.
A photograph emerged Saturday showing a group in Kafranbel, Syria, posing with a banner that quotes a line the late funnyman delivered as the Genie in the animated Disney movie “Aladdin.”
“To be free. Such a thing would be greater than all the magic and all the treasures in all the world,” the banner says.
Every week, the Kafranbel Media Center makes such a banner, usually in English, to broadcast its pro-democracy message to the world — hoping to win over American sympathy and intervention.
Many of the group’s banners have blasted the Obama administration’s refusal to arm pro-democracy Syrian rebels.
In 2011, the group displayed a banner that said: “Obama’s procrastination kills us; we miss Bush’s audacity. The world is better with America’s Republicans.”
Other members of Syria’s Western-backed opposition called on Saturday for airstrikes against the Islamic State extremist group, which captured three villages in the northern part of the country.
The Islamic State has overrun nearly a dozen towns and villages in northern Aleppo province and threatens the rebels’ foothold in Aleppo.
The Syrian National Coalition on Saturday urged the international community to “quickly support the Free Syrian Army with weapons and ammunition.”
Meanwhile, Islamic State radicals in Iraq killed 300 men of the Yazidi minority and took 1,000 women and children hostage, Kurdish officials said.
The atrocity occurred Friday when militants laid siege to the village of Kocho, news reports said. The Yazidis — seen by Islamic State as devil worshippers — were told, “You have two choices: Be killed or convert to Islam.”
Then the men of the village were divided into two groups. “The elderly were killed in the school yard while the other men were taken outside the village to a field by a small spring and were mass-executed,” a Kurdish official told The Sunday Times of London.
The whereabouts of the women and children were unclear. Mirza Dinnayi, a Yazidi activist, said the Islamic State separated “the pretty ones”— some as young as 10 — from the rest of the women.
The US slammed Islamic State forces in northern Iraq with a mix of drones and Navy F-18s and F-16s that hit checkpoints and personnel, a Defense Department official said.
A senior Kurdish military official said his group is making preparations to retake Mosul Dam, a hydro station whose destruction could cause widespread flooding.