WESTERN-BACKED “moderates” in Syria are threatening to publicly execute anyone supplying food to besieged government-held areas.

The edict from the self-styled Judicial Council of the Jaish al-Fatah (Army of Conquest) was posted on the Twitter account of the web-based Terror Monitor and translated for the Morning Star.

The group’s decree, issued on Monday, said that it must be circulated to all mosques and imams in the areas under its domination by today.

It orders that anyone caught smuggling food, fuel or other human necessities into the besieged villages of Kafarya and Fu’ah, north-east of Idlib city, will be executed in the square of their home town.

The statement is peppered with fundamentalist and sectarian language, referring to President Bashar al-Assad’s government as the “criminal Alawite regime” — a reference to the Shi’ite sect that the Assad family belongs to and those who help it as “defectors in the army of Satan.”

The Army of Conquest, which occupies the northern Syrian city of Idlib and most of the surrounding province, is an alliance of extremist factions, with the two most prominent being the al-Qaida-affiliated Nusra Front and Ahrar ash-Sham, which boasts 10,000-20,000 guerillas.

Ahrar as-Sham’s inclusion in the Saudi-backed High Negotiations Committee (HNC), along with the equally brutal Jaish al-Islam (Army of Islam), provoked protests from Syria and Russia that terrorists had been invited to the Geneva negotiating table.

But the HNC refused to enter the UN-mediated talks until the government agreed to their precondition of a unilateral ceasefire and the free flow of supplies to insurgent pockets.

Crucially the decree speaks of “liberating the Islamic State of al-Sham” (Isis).

The HNC finally abandoned any pretence of negotiation last week after the Syrian army, backed by Lebanese Hezbollah guerillas and Russian air strikes, cut their main supply line from Turkey north of Aleppo.

Monday’s edict claims a humanitarian motive for starving the population of the two villages into surrender or death, declaring that the aim is to end the army’s sieges of militant-held areas.

One of those areas is the town of Madaya, where Ahrar ash-Sham gunmen opened fire overnight on Wednesday on a Red Crescent convoy evacuating three sick people. Fortunately, no injuries were reported.