BEIRUT: A member of the militant Islamic State (IS) group killed his mother in a public square in the Syrian city of Raqa, a monitor said on Friday.

Ali Saqr, 20, reported his mother, Lina, to IS authorities in Raqa “because she tried to persuade him to leave IS and flee the city”, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The authorities subsequently arrested the woman and accused her of apostasy, the monitoring group said.

On Wednesday, she was shot to death by her son “in front of hundreds of people close to the mail service building in Raqa city”, the Observatory said.

Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said the woman, who was in her forties, was living in the nearby town of Tabaqa but worked in Raqa city.

The incident was widely condemned online by social media users.

Raqa is the de facto Syrian capital of IS’s so-called “caliphate”, the territories it controls in Syria and Iraq where it imposes its harsh interpretations of Islamic law.

Among the crimes that warrant a death sentence in IS territories are homosexuality and adultery, according to the Observatory.

Other acts punishable by death range from blocking roads to “betraying Muslims” and working with anti-IS groups including the “crusader” US-led coalition.

Even capturing and torturing an anti-IS activist or fighter without proper authorisation from the authorities could be met with a death sentence. But in IS-held territories, using child soldiers and “owning slaves” are both legal.

The extremist group has been accused of carrying out mass killings, torture, rape and sexual slavery. A US-led coalition has been striking the militants in Syria and Iraq for over a year.

More than 260,000 people have been killed in Syria’s war since it erupted in March 2011.

Published in Dawn, January 9th, 2016