\n<\/p>\n
Bashar Abdo had just returned home last month after four years in the Syrian military when a mob of neighbors and others armed with guns and knives swarmed his family\u2019s front door and accused him of being a thug for the ousted regime.<\/p>\n
His sisters and sister-in-law tried to block the crowd as he hid. But people stormed in and found Mr. Abdo, 22, in the kitchen. They stabbed him before dragging him outside, even as his sister, Marwa, clung to him. There, he was shot.<\/p>\n
The account, shared by Mr. Abdo\u2019s family, was confirmed by local police in the northwestern city of Idlib. Video footage widely shared on Syrian social media and verified by The New York Times captured the gruesome scene that followed: As Ms. Abdo gripped his lifeless body, neighbors continued to kick him. She begged them to stop, saying he was already dead.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is your fate,\u201d one man yelled. Other verified video footage shows a crowd shouting expletives after Mr. Abdo\u2019s body was tied by the neck to a car and dragged through the streets. It is not clear who filmed the video.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Ms. Abdo recalled those moments in an interview with The Times four days later. She vowed revenge, a sign of the growing threat of a cycle of violent retribution in a new Syria.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The country is emerging suddenly and unexpectedly from 13 years of civil war and more than five decades under the Assad dynasty, which maintained its grip on power with fear, torture and mass killings.<\/p>\n
The killing of Mr. Abdo underscores the complicated reckoning ahead in Syria, where the wounds remain fresh and anger is close to the surface. Many Syrians want accountability for crimes conducted during the civil war<\/a>. Others are seeking vengeance.<\/p>\n At least half a million Syrians were killed during the war, most of them in airstrikes carried out by Syrian warplanes and helicopters or in prison under torture or in mass executions, according to Syrian human rights groups. Many people remain unaccounted for.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Officials with the new interim Syrian government, headed by the Islamist rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, are racing to set up courts and police forces to address decades of grievances. They are urging citizens to forgive and not take matters into their own hands.<\/p>\n Ahmed al-Shara, the head of the rebel alliance that overthrew the Assad government, has said that it will hunt down and prosecute<\/a> senior figures for crimes that include murdering, wrongly imprisoning, torturing and gassing their own people, but that rank-and-file conscripted soldiers would receive amnesty.<\/p>\n