Talk:FSA prisoner videos

Good job starting the page. I'd add to it, but the "I" part confuses me. 304 videos! A tally to show the scale of achievement would be good. Clearly an intro paragraph would be good, and some snippets on their known treatment of prisoners (that is, many will be dead by now, and many will have suffered horrible things). I'll see about adding a little later. But I'm not familiar with the videos themselves, other than maybe a few of them. --Caustic Logic 08:11, 20 September 2012 (EST)

Russian female captives
The latest video shows two young blonds from Belarus and Moldova confessing to being spies sent by Hezbollah.
 * اسرة من روسيا يعملون كعملاء لحزب الله (Women from Belarus acting as agents for Hezbollah) – shaker motlak, Uploaded on Aug 9, 2013
 * Syria Al Nusra kidnap Russian Women اسرة من روسيا يعملون كعملاء لحزب الله
 * Belarus Foreign Ministry spokesman Andrey Savinykh said on August 14 that it is too early draw firm conclusions from the video, which has been circulating on the Internet since August 13 and shows two young women surrounded by an armed and masked Saudi backed Salafist death squad.
 * One of the women says she is from Moldova. The other calls herself Svyatlana Markiyanovich from Belarus.
 * The women say in the video that they are agents of Hizballah and came to Syria with falsified documents as journalists to collect information about the Free Syrian Army

-- Petri Krohn (talk) 07:20, 18 August 2013 (UTC)

More info:
 * naviny.by/, August 14: Belarusian woman believed to have been kidnapped by Syrian rebels: says video posted August 9. Svyatlana Markiyanovich "a 30-year-old resident of Zhodzina, Minsk region. She visited her page on June 17, 2013, for the last time. One of her photographs was apparently taken when she was travelling in an aircraft." The other: Karina Koltso, Modlovan, age 32, apparently girlfriends.
 * A brother of Ms. Koltso, Leonid Bydko, confirmed to the Belarus Service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that his sister left on July 25 to “earn some money.” :“She phoned me a week ago and said that she had been kidnapped,” Mr. Bydko said. “She says that she was kidnapped from her girlfriend’s place, and that they are both in captivity now.” Ms. Koltso’s first phone call to her brother was from a Lebanese number. The July 25 call was from a Syrian number. The woman said that she was in Syria. The 32-year-old Koltso has no husband, children or job. Her brother so far has not reported her kidnapping to authorities. --Caustic Logic (talk) 09:36, 18 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Quickly pulled: "Svyatlana Markiyanovich's uncle: She could work as dancer abroad ...." No longer at the two links Google offers. Must say, posing as Russian-ish journalists in Syria is not such a good cover for spies, when Slavs stick out and have been generally tagged for death. And to admit you're there to collect and send back information? With no apparent background in journalism? --Caustic Logic (talk) 09:36, 18 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I suspect they were relaxing in Lebanon when taken captive, and might still be there, just near a Syrian phone. Same people who blew up the car bomb the other day in Beirut, deadliest in 20 years, in response to Hezbollah dragging Lebanon into civil war, as Saad Hariri complains. Or perhaps the Sunnis extremists did carry the ladies along on another of their own incursions into Syria. Near a Lebanese phone maybe, so the calls might all be from inside Syria. --Caustic Logic (talk) 09:36, 18 August 2013 (UTC)


 * The Belorussian Euroradio is not very well informed: "It is not clear how she reached Syria, who sent her there and why."
 * You are right, there is not proof or even indication that the women ever went to Syria. Compare this to the case of the Estonian cyclist kidnapped in Lebanon in 2011. (The Western media has failed to note the connection between the kidnappers and the Syrian "revolutionaries.") -- Petri Krohn (talk) 10:06, 18 August 2013 (UTC)