For centuries, people have wondered whether a severed human head can remain conscious and think. Modern experiments on mammals and numerous eyewitness accounts provide rich material for debate and discussion.
Decapitation in Europe
The tradition of beheading has deep roots in the history and culture of many peoples. For example, one of the biblical deuterocanonical books tells the famous story of Judith, a beautiful Jewish woman who deceived herself into the camp of the Assyrians who were besieging her hometown and, having gained the trust of the enemy commander Holofernes, cut off his head at night.
In the largest European states, decapitation was considered one of the noblest types of executions. The ancient Romans used it on their citizens because the beheading process is quick and less painful than crucifixion, which was carried out on criminals without Roman citizenship.
In Medieval Europe, beheading also enjoyed special honor. Only nobles had their heads cut off; peasants and artisans were hanged and drowned.
Only in the 20th century was decapitation recognized by Western civilization as inhumane and barbaric. Currently, beheading as capital punishment is used only in the countries of the Middle East: Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Iran.
Judith and Holofernes
History of the guillotine
Heads were usually cut off with axes and swords. Moreover, if in some countries, for example, in Saudi Arabia, executioners always underwent special training, then in the Middle Ages ordinary guards or artisans were often used to carry out the sentence. As a result, in many cases it was not possible to cut off the head the first time, which led to terrible torture for the condemned and indignation of the crowd of onlookers.
Therefore, at the end of the 18th century, the guillotine was first introduced as an alternative and more humane instrument of execution. Contrary to popular belief, this instrument did not get its name in honor of its inventor, surgeon Antoun Louis.
The godfather of the death machine was Joseph Ignace Guillotin, a professor of anatomy, who first proposed using a mechanism for decapitation, which, in his opinion, would not cause additional pain to the condemned.
The first sentence using a terrible novelty was carried out in 1792 in post-revolutionary France. The guillotine made it possible to actually turn human deaths into a real conveyor belt; thanks to her, in just one year, Jacobin executioners executed more than 30,000 French citizens, inflicting real terror on their people.
However, a couple of years later, the beheading machine gave a ceremonial reception to the Jacobins themselves, amid the joyful shouts and hooting of the crowd. France used it as capital punishment until 1977, when the last head was cut off on European soil.
But what happens during decapitation from a physiological point of view?
As you know, the cardiovascular system, through blood arteries, delivers oxygen and other necessary substances to the brain, which are necessary for its normal functioning. Decapitation interrupts the closed circulatory system and blood pressure drops rapidly, depriving the brain of fresh blood flow. Suddenly deprived of oxygen, the brain quickly stops functioning.
The time during which the head of the executed person can remain conscious depends largely on the method of execution. If an inept executioner needed several blows to separate the head from the body, blood flowed from the arteries even before the end of the execution - the severed head was already long dead.
Head of Charlotte Corday
But the guillotine was an ideal instrument of death; its knife cut the criminal’s neck with lightning speed and very accurately. In post-revolutionary France, where executions took place in public, the executioner often raised a head that had fallen into a basket of bran and mockingly showed it to a crowd of onlookers.
For example, in 1793, after the execution of Charlotte Corday, who stabbed to death one of the leaders of the French Revolution, Jean-Paul Marat, according to eyewitnesses, the executioner, taking the severed head by the hair, mockingly whipped her across the cheeks. To the great amazement of the spectators, Charlotte's face turned red and her features twisted into a grimace of indignation.
Thus, the first documentary report of eyewitnesses was compiled that a person’s head severed by a guillotine was capable of retaining consciousness. But far from the last.
What explains the grimaces on the face?
The debate about whether the human brain is able to continue to think after beheading has continued for many decades. Some believed that the grimaces that made the faces of those executed were explained by ordinary spasms of the muscles that controlled the movements of the lips and eyes. Similar spasms were often observed in other severed human limbs.
The difference is that, unlike the arms and legs, the head contains the brain, a mental center that can consciously control muscle movements. When the head is cut off, in principle, no trauma is caused to the brain, so it is able to function until a lack of oxygen leads to loss of consciousness and death.
Severed head
There are many known cases where, after cutting off the head, the body of a chicken continued to move around the yard for several seconds. Dutch researchers conducted studies on rats; they lived for another full 4 seconds after decapitation.
Testimonies of doctors and eyewitnesses
The idea of what a severed human head might experience while remaining fully conscious is, of course, terrifying. A US Army veteran who was involved in a car accident with a friend in 1989 described the face of his comrade, whose head was torn off: “At first it expressed shock, then horror, and finally fear gave way to sadness...”
Mechanism for carrying out the death penalty by cutting off the head
According to eyewitnesses, the English King Charles I and Queen Anne Boleyn moved their lips after their execution at the hands of the executioner, trying to say something.
Categorically opposing the use of the guillotine, the German scientist Sommering referred to numerous records from doctors that the faces of those executed were distorted in pain when the doctors touched the cut of the spinal canal with their fingers.
The most famous of this kind of evidence comes from the pen of Dr. Borieux, who examined the head of the executed criminal Henri Langille. The doctor writes that within 25-30 seconds after decapitation, he called Langille by name twice, and each time he opened his eyes and fixed his gaze on Borjo.
A terrible incident during an execution
For thousands of years, beheading has been used as a form of capital punishment. In medieval Europe, such an execution was considered “honorable”; the heads were cut off mainly for aristocrats; simpler people faced the gallows or the fire. At that time, beheading with a sword, ax or an ax was a relatively painless and quick death, especially with the great experience of the executioner and the sharpness of his weapon.
In order for the executioner to try, the convict or his relatives paid him a lot of money, this was facilitated by the widely circulating terrible stories about a dull sword and an incompetent executioner who cut off the head of the unfortunate convict with only a few blows... For example, it is documented that in 1587, during the execution of the Scottish queen For Mary Stuart, the executioner needed three blows to decapitate her, and even then he had to resort to using a knife...
Even worse were the cases when non-professionals got down to business. In 1682, the French Count de Samozh was terribly unlucky - they could not get a real executioner for his execution. Two criminals agreed to perform his work in exchange for pardon. They were so frightened by such a responsible job and so worried about their future that they cut off the count’s head only on the 34th attempt!
Residents of medieval cities often became eyewitnesses to beheadings; for them, execution was something like a free performance, so many tried to take a place closer to the scaffold in advance in order to see such a nerve-wracking process in detail. Then such thrill-seekers, widening their eyes, whispered about how the severed head grimaced or how its lips managed to whisper the last goodbye.
It was widely believed that the severed head still lived and saw for about ten seconds. That is why the executioner raised his severed head and showed it to those gathered in the city square; it was believed that the executed man in his last seconds saw a jubilant crowd, hooting and laughing at him.
I don’t know whether to believe it or not, but once in a book I read about a rather terrible incident that happened during one of the executions. Usually the executioner raised his head to show the crowd by his hair, but in this case the executed man was bald or shaved, in general, the hair on his brain container was completely absent, so the executioner decided to lift his head by the upper jaw and, without thinking twice, put his fingers into his slightly open mouth. Immediately the executioner screamed and his face was distorted by a grimace of pain, and no wonder, because the jaws of the severed head clenched... The already executed man managed to bite his executioner!
How does a severed head feel?
The French Revolution brought beheadings to the masses by using “small mechanization” - the guillotine, invented at that time. Heads were flying in such quantities that some inquisitive surgeon easily begged the executioner for a whole basket of male and female “vessels of the mind” for his experiments. He tried to sew human heads to the bodies of dogs, but was a complete fiasco in this “revolutionary” endeavor.
At the same time, scientists began to be increasingly tormented by the question - what does a severed head feel and how long does it live after the fatal blow of the guillotine blade? Only in 1983, after a special medical study, scientists were able to answer the first half of the question. Their conclusion was this: despite the sharpness of the execution weapon, the skill of the executioner or the lightning speed of the guillotine, the person’s head (and probably the body!) experiences several seconds of severe pain.
Many naturalists of the 18th-19th centuries had no doubt that a severed head was capable of living for a very short time and, in some cases, even thinking. There is now an opinion that the final death of the head occurs a maximum of 60 seconds after execution.
In 1803, in Breslau, a young doctor Wendt, who later became a university professor, conducted a rather terrible experiment. On February 25, Wendt asked for the head of the executed murderer Troer for scientific purposes. He received his head from the hands of the executioner immediately after the execution. First of all, Wendt conducted experiments with the then popular electricity: when he applied a plate of a galvanic apparatus to the cut spinal cord, the face of the executed man was distorted by a grimace of suffering.
The inquisitive doctor did not stop there, he made a quick false movement, as if about to pierce Troer’s eyes with his fingers; they quickly closed, as if noticing the danger threatening them. Then Wendt shouted loudly in his ears a couple of times: “Troer!” With each of his screams, the head opened its eyes, clearly reacting to its name. Moreover, the head was recorded attempting to say something; it opened its mouth and moved its lips a little. I wouldn’t be surprised if Troer tried to send away such a disrespectful young man to death...
In the final part of the experiment, a finger was inserted into the head's mouth, while it clenched its teeth quite tightly, causing sensitive pain. For two whole minutes and 40 seconds the head served the purposes of science, after which its eyes finally closed and all signs of life faded away.
In 1905, Wendt's experiment was partially repeated by a French doctor. He also shouted his name to the head of the executed man, while the eyes of the severed head opened and the pupils focused on the doctor. The head reacted to its name twice in this way, and the third time its vital energy had already run out.
The body lives without a head!
If the head can live without a body for a short time, then the body can function for a short time without its “control center”! A unique case is known from history with Dietz von Schaunburg, executed in 1336. When King Ludwig of Bavaria sentenced von Schaunburg and his four Landsknechts to death for rebellion, the monarch, according to knightly tradition, asked the condemned man about his last wish. To the great amazement of the king, Schaunburg asked him to pardon those of his comrades whom he could run past without a head after execution.
Considering this request to be sheer nonsense, the king nevertheless promised to do it. Schaunburg himself arranged his friends in a row at a distance of eight steps from each other, after which he obediently knelt down and lowered his head on the block standing on the edge. The executioner's sword cut through the air with a whistle, the head literally bounced off the body, and then a miracle happened: Dietz's headless body jumped to its feet and... ran. It was able to run past all four landsknechts, taking more than 32 steps, and only after that it stopped and fell.
Both the convicts and those close to the king froze in horror for a short moment, and then everyone’s eyes turned to the monarch with a silent question, everyone was waiting for his decision. Although the stunned Ludwig of Bavaria was sure that the devil himself had helped Dietz escape, he still kept his word and pardoned the friends of the executed man.
Another striking incident occurred in 1528 in the city of Rodstadt. The unjustly convicted monk said that after the execution he would be able to prove his innocence, and asked not to touch his body for a few minutes. The executioner's ax blew off the condemned man's head, and three minutes later the headless body turned over, lay on its back, carefully crossing its arms over its chest. After this, the monk was posthumously declared innocent...
At the beginning of the 19th century, during the colonial war in India, the commander of B Company, 1st Yorkshire Line Regiment, Captain T. Mulven, was killed under extremely unusual circumstances. During the assault on Fort Amara, during hand-to-hand combat, Malven cut off the head of an enemy soldier with a saber. However, after this, the decapitated enemy managed to raise his rifle and shoot straight into the captain’s heart. Documentary evidence of this incident in the form of a report from Corporal R. Crickshaw was preserved in the archives of the British War Ministry.
A resident of the city of Tula, I. S. Koblatkin, reported to one of the newspapers about a shocking incident during the Great Patriotic War, of which he was an eyewitness: “We were raised to attack under artillery fire. The soldier ahead of me had his neck broken by a large fragment, so much so that his head literally hung behind his back like a terrible hood... Nevertheless, he continued to run before falling.”
The phenomenon of the missing brain
If there is no brain, then what coordinates the movements of a body left without a head? In medical practice, numerous cases have been described that make it possible to raise the question of some kind of revision of the role of the brain in human life. For example, the famous German brain specialist Hufland had to fundamentally change his previous views when he opened the skull of a patient suffering from paralysis. Instead of a brain, it contained a little more than 300 grams of water, but his patient had previously retained all his mental abilities and was no different from a person with a brain!
In 1935, a child was born at St. Vincent's Hospital in New York; his behavior was no different from ordinary babies; he ate, cried, and reacted to his mother in the same way. When he died 27 days later, an autopsy revealed that the baby had no brain at all...
In 1940, a 14-year-old boy was admitted to the clinic of the Bolivian doctor Nicola Ortiz, who complained of terrible headaches. Doctors suspected a brain tumor. He could not be helped and died two weeks later. An autopsy showed that his entire skull was occupied by a giant tumor, which almost completely destroyed his brain. It turned out that the boy actually lived without a brain, but until his death he was not only conscious, but also retained sound thinking.
An equally sensational fact was presented in a report by doctors Jan Bruel and George Albee in 1957 to the American Psychological Association. They talked about their operation, during which the entire right hemisphere of the brain was completely removed from a 39-year-old patient. Their patient not only survived, but also fully retained his mental abilities, and they were above average.
The list of similar cases could be continued. Many people, after operations, head injuries, and terrible injuries, continued to live, move and think without a significant part of the brain. What helps them maintain a sound mind and, in some cases, even productivity?
Relatively recently, American scientists announced their discovery of a “third brain” in humans. In addition to the brain and spinal cord, they also discovered the so-called “abdominal brain,” represented by a collection of nervous tissue on the inside of the esophagus and stomach. According to Michael Gershon, a professor at a research center in New York, this “abdominal brain” has more than 100 million neurons, which is even more than in the spinal cord.
American researchers believe that it is the “abdominal brain” that gives the command to release hormones in case of danger, pushing a person to either fight or flee. According to scientists, this third “administrative center” remembers information, is able to accumulate life experience, and affects our mood and well-being. Maybe it is in the “abdominal brain” that the answer to the intelligent behavior of headless bodies lies?
Heads are still being cut off
Alas, no abdominal brain will allow one to live without a head, and they are still chopped down, even for princesses... It would seem that beheading, as a type of execution, has long sunk into oblivion, but back in the first half of the 60s. In the 20th century, it was used in the GDR, then, in 1966, the only guillotine broke and criminals began to be shot.
But in the Middle East you can still quite officially lose your head.
In 1980, a documentary film by English cameraman Anthony Thomas, called “The Death of a Princess,” literally caused an international shock. It showed the public beheading of a Saudi princess and her lover. In 1995, a record 192 people were beheaded in Saudi Arabia. After this, the number of such executions began to decrease. In 1996, 29 men and one woman were beheaded in the kingdom.
In 1997, approximately 125 people were beheaded worldwide. At least as far back as 2005, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Qatar had laws allowing beheadings. It is reliably known that in Saudi Arabia a special executioner used his skills already in the new millennium.
As for criminal acts, Islamic extremists sometimes decapitate people; there have been cases where criminal gangs of Colombian drug lords did the same thing. In 2003, a certain extravagant British suicide became world famous, who deprived himself of his head using a self-built guillotine.
Does the brain continue to live and perceive the world around us for a few minutes after the head instantly flies off the shoulders, as, for example, in the guillotine?
Wednesday marked 125 years since the last execution by beheading in Denmark, bringing with it a creepy question from a reader: Does a person die instantly when their head is cut off?
“I just once heard that the brain dies from loss of blood only a few minutes after cutting off the head, that is, people executed, for example, by the guillotine, in principle could “see” and “hear” their surroundings, although they were already dead. Is it true?" - asks Anette.
The thought of seeing your own headless body in anyone will make you shudder, and in fact this question arose several hundred years ago, when the guillotine began to be used as a humane method of execution after the French Revolution.
The severed head turned red
The revolution was a real bloodbath, during which 14 thousand heads were cut off from March 1793 to August 1794.
And it was then that the question that interested our reader was first raised - this happened in connection with the execution by guillotine of Charlotte Corday, the woman who killed the revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat, sentenced to death.
After the execution, rumors spread that when one of the revolutionaries took her severed head out of the basket and slapped her in the face, her face became distorted with anger. There were those who claimed that they saw her blush from the insult.
But could this really happen?
The brain can live a little
“She couldn’t have turned red anyway, because that requires blood pressure,” says animal physiology professor Tobias Wang of Aarhus University, where he studies circulation and metabolism, among other things.
Nevertheless, he cannot decisively exclude that after cutting off her head she was still conscious for some time.
“The thing with our brain is that its mass makes up only 2% of the entire body, while it consumes about 20% of energy. The brain itself does not have a glycogen reserve (energy depot - Videnskab), so as soon as the blood supply stops, it immediately ends up in the hands of God, so to speak.”
In other words, the question is how long the brain has enough energy, and the professor wouldn't be surprised if it lasted at least a couple of seconds.
If we turn to his domain of zoology, there is at least one species of animal that is known to have a head that can continue to live without a body: reptiles.
Severed turtle heads can live for several more days
On YouTube, for example, you can find terrifying videos where the heads of snakes without a body quickly snap their mouths, ready to bite into the victim with their long poisonous teeth.
This is possible because reptiles have a very slow metabolism, so if the head is intact, their brain can continue to live.
“Turtles especially stand out,” says Tobias Wang, who tells of a colleague who had to use turtle brains for experiments and put the severed heads in the refrigerator, assuming they would, of course, die there.
“But they lived for another two or three days,” says Tobias Wang, adding that this, like the guillotine question, raises an ethical dilemma.
“From an animal ethics perspective, the fact that turtle heads do not die immediately after being separated from the body may be a problem.”
“When we need a turtle’s brain, and it must not contain any anesthetics, we put the head in liquid nitrogen, and then it dies instantly,” the scientist explains.
Lavoisier winked from the basket
Returning to us people, Tobias Wang told the famous story about the great chemist Antoine Lavoisier, who was executed by guillotine on May 8, 1794.
“Being one of the greatest scientists in history, he asked his good friend, the mathematician Lagrange, to count how many times he winked after his head was cut off.”
Thus Lavoisier was about to make his final contribution to science by trying to help answer the question of whether a person remains conscious after cutting off his head.
He was going to blink once per second, and, according to some stories, blinked 10 times, and according to others - 30 times, but all this, as Tobias Vand says, unfortunately, is still a myth.
According to science historian William B. Jensen of the University of Cincinnati in the US, the wink is not mentioned in any of the accepted biographies of Lavoisier, which, however, says that Lagrange was present at the execution, but was in the corner of the square - too far away to perform your part of the experiment.
The severed head looked at the doctor
The guillotine was introduced as a symbol of a new, humanistic order in society. Therefore, rumors about Charlotte Corday and others were completely inappropriate and gave rise to lively scientific debates among doctors in France, England and Germany.
The question was never satisfactorily answered and was raised again and again until 1905, when one of the most convincing experiments was carried out on human heads.
Context
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BBC Russian Service 08/20/2014Is the death penalty necessary?
Gezitter.org 01/27/2015 This experiment was described by the French doctor Beaurieux, who conducted it with the head of Henri Languille, sentenced to death.As Borjo describes it, immediately after the guillotine he noted that Langille's lips and eyes moved spasmodically for 5-6 seconds, after which the movement stopped. And when Doctor Borjo loudly shouted “Langille!” a couple of seconds later, the eyes opened, the pupils focused and looked intently at the doctor, as if he had woken the man from sleep.
“I saw undoubtedly living eyes looking at me,” writes Borjo.
After this, the eyelids drooped, but the doctor again managed to wake up the convict’s head by shouting his name, and only on the third attempt nothing happened.
Not minutes, but seconds
This account is not a scientific report in the modern sense, and Tobias Wang doubts that a person can really remain conscious for that long.
“I believe a couple of seconds is really possible,” he says, and explains that reflexes and muscle contractions may remain, but the brain itself suffers enormous blood loss and goes into a coma, so that the person quickly loses consciousness.
This assessment is supported by a tried-and-true rule known to cardiologists, which states that when the heart stops, the brain remains conscious for up to four seconds if a person is standing, up to eight seconds if he is sitting, and up to 12 seconds if he is lying down.
As a result, we have not really clarified whether the head can retain consciousness after being cut off from the body: minutes, of course, are excluded, but the version of seconds does not seem incredible.
And if you count: one, two, three, you can easily see that this is enough to realize your surroundings, which means that this method of execution has nothing to do with humanity.
The guillotine has become a symbol of a new, humane society
The French guillotine had great symbolic significance in the new republic after the revolution, where it was introduced as a new, humane way of carrying out the death penalty.
According to Danish historian Inga Floto, who wrote A Cultural History of the Death Penalty (2001), the guillotine became a tool that showed “how the new regime's humane attitude toward the death penalty contrasted with the barbarity of the previous regime.”
It is no coincidence that the guillotine appears as a formidable mechanism with a clear and simple geometry, which emanates rationality and efficiency.
The guillotine received its name in honor of the physician Joseph Guillotin (J.I. Guillotin), who, after the French Revolution, became famous and extolled for proposing a reform of the penal system, making the law equal for all and punishing criminals equally regardless of their status.
© flickr.com, Karl-Ludwig Poggemann Severed head of Louis XVI, executed by guillotine
In addition, Guillotin argued that execution should be carried out humanely so that the victim experienced minimal pain, in contrast to the brutal practice of the times when an executioner with an ax or sword often had to strike several times before he could separate the head from the body.
When, in 1791, the French National Assembly, after long debates about whether to abolish the death penalty altogether, decided instead that “the death penalty should be limited to the simple taking of life without any torture of the convicted person,” Guillotin’s ideas were adopted.
This led to earlier forms of "falling blade" instruments being refined into the guillotine, which thus became a significant symbol of the new social order.
The guillotine was abolished in 1981
The guillotine remained the only instrument of execution in France until the abolition of the death penalty in 1981 (!). Public executions were abolished in France in 1939.
Latest executions in Denmark
In 1882, Anders Nielsen Sjællænder, a farm worker on the island of Lolland, was sentenced to death for murder.
On November 22, 1882, the only executioner in the country, Jens Sejstrup, swung an ax.
The execution caused a great stir in the press - especially because Seistrup had to be hit with an ax several times before his head was separated from his body.
Anders Schelländer became the last person to be publicly executed in Denmark.
The next execution took place behind closed doors at Horsens prison. The death penalty in Denmark was abolished in 1933.
Soviet scientists transplanted dog heads
If you can handle a little more horrifying and spine-chilling scientific experimentation, watch this video that shows Soviet experiments simulating the reverse situation: severed dogs' heads are kept alive using artificial blood supply.
The video was presented by British biologist JBS Haldane, who said that he himself had conducted several similar experiments.
Doubts arose whether the video was propaganda exaggerating the achievements of Soviet scientists. Nevertheless, it is a generally accepted fact that Russian scientists were pioneers in the field of organ transplantation, including transplanting the heads of dogs.
These experiences inspired South African doctor Christiaan Barnard, who earned worldwide fame by performing the world's first heart transplant.
We thank our reader for her question and are sending her a Videnskab.dk T-shirt as a reward. We also thank our expert Tobias Wang for helping us shed some light on this daunting topic. If you want to ask a question to science yourself, send it here: [email protected].
InoSMI materials contain assessments exclusively of foreign media and do not reflect the position of the InoSMI editorial staff.
Scary footage from Syria. They should not be watched by children or impressionable people.. Militants fighting on the side of the opposition, which wants to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad, cut off the heads of Catholic priests with a knife. To intimidate the whole world, these images are posted on the Internet.
Leaders of Western countries have repeatedly stated that it is necessary to begin supplying weapons to the Syrian opposition and bring all parties to the conflict to the negotiating table. Who can guarantee that in such a scenario, looters and murderers of priests will not sit at this table?
No last word, no explanation. The defendants' faces are covered with bandages. They listen to their own verdict tied up, sitting on the ground. The armed man here is the investigator, the prosecutor, and the judge. It takes him a couple of minutes to study all the circumstances of the case of Catholic priests. The field commander lists the sins of the monk Francois Murad on his fingers, the main one of which is cooperation with government troops.
Francois Murad served and preached in a monastery in northern Syria. Like many previously executed and murdered priests and imams, he was not a supporter of the rebels. For this, according to the laws of the militants fighting against the Syrian government, the death penalty is imposed.
Amid the approving cries of the crowd - hundreds of people are watching this trial - the executioner cuts off the heads of the unfortunate people with a knife. These images are no less shocking than the video previously published by militants, where the leader of one of the armed groups eats the entrails of a dead soldier. Often small children are present at executions, and the militants themselves comment on the details of what is happening, and in Russian.
This video once again confirms: in the ranks of the international army of mercenaries fighting against the Syrian government there are many bandits from the countries of the former Soviet Union.
The death of the priests was confirmed by the Vatican. In Damascus, both Christians and Muslims, who had lived with each other for centuries, condemned the execution.
"Those who committed these heinous crimes may wear religious headdresses, the robes of spiritual guides, but for them it is just a shell. Inside these animals is a devilish, not an Islamic essence! Who allowed them to cut off people's heads?! The Prophet said, that such things will never go unpunished! We mourn together with the whole world," said Mullah Tajaddin Al-Farfur.
“It’s impossible to describe this in words, it’s impossible to forgive! We, of course, preach forgiveness, and even if they come at us with a knife, we can still only respond with a cross. But you can’t even find this in animals - they behave more humane than these non-humans,” - said Roman Catholic priest Elijah Francis.
The number of clergy killed at the hands of militants - they are killed in Syrian churches and mosques - numbers in the dozens. Recently it became known about the death and abduction of 2 metropolitans of the Greek and Syrian Orthodox churches in Aleppo back in April.
“For so many years, no one even asked who you are: a Muslim, a Christian, a Druze, a Jew. I am an Armenian by my mother, but I consider myself a Syrian. And after everything that happened, you already begin to twitch, and every now and then you catch sidelong glances at yourself,” says George Atun.
Such proximity and peaceful coexistence of religions in Syria, when there are mosques and temples on the same street or side by side, when a Muslim can go to a church and pray, is now under threat. The militants are trying to drive a wedge not only between religious minorities, but also between different sects of Islam itself - Sunnis and Shiites. The bandits' calls are terrible and categorical: Christians - to Lebanon, Shiites - under the knife.