This incident shows up, among other things, the uselessness of vetting procedures. Western authorities are looking for jihadis while denying the motivating ideology that fuels the jihad: it’s a recipe for letting mass murderers into one’s country. This one was with the Free Syrian Army, which a few years ago was the “moderate” favorite of the Western establishment media. “We have a Free Syrian Army and a moderate opposition that we have steadily been working with that we have vetted,” said Barack Obama a few years ago.
How moderate? This moderate: in July 2013, Free Syrian Army fighters entered the Christian village of Oum Sharshouh and began burning down houses and terrorizing the population, forcing 250 Christian families to flee the area. Worthy News reported that just two days later, Free Syrian Army rebels “targeted the residents of al-Duwayr/Douar, a Christian village close to the city of Homs and near Syria’s border with Lebanon….Around 350 armed militants forcefully entered the homes of Christian families who were all rounded-up in the main square of the village and then summarily executed.” And in September 2013, a day after Secretary of State John Kerry praised the Free Syrian Army as “a real moderate opposition,” the FSA took to the Internet to post videos of its attack on the ancient Syrian Christian city of Maaloula, one of the few places where Aramaic, the language of Jesus, is still spoken.
This particular “moderate,” seeking asylum in Austria, was found to have murdered twenty Syrian soldiers.
“Austria Convicts Asylum Seeker of War Crimes for Killing 20 Syrian Soldiers,” by Callum Paton, Newsweek, May 11, 2017:
A court in Austria has sentenced an asylum seeker to life in prison after he confessed to murdering 20 wounded soldiers from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s army while fighting in a rebel militia in Syria.
The court in Innsbruck found the 27-year-old man guilty of war crimes based on his confession. According to local media, he told others at a refugee shelter that he had shot dead government soldiers while fighting with the Free Syrian Army, a group opposed to Assad. He was arrested in western Austria in June.
According to the Austrian Press Agency the asylum seeker, identified only as a Palestinian who grew up in a refugee camp in the Syrian city of Homs, claimed a statement he had given to officials confessing to the killings had been incorrectly translated.
However, the the interpreter who gave evidence against him vouched for the precision of the confession. “He told me that he shot an injured soldier. I even asked him again and he confirmed it,” the interpreter said. At the end of the interview the accused asylum seeker had signed every page of his testimony….