Bombing kills leaders of Syrian rebel group

The leader of an ultraconservative Islamic rebel group in Syria was killed Tuesday in a suicide bombing along with other of its top officials, its allies said, weakening the ranks of the country’s already shaky armed opposition. No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack that killed Hassan Aboud and other leading members of Ahrar al-Sham, part of the strongest front that challenged the Islamic State group, which holds wide swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria. But given that forces loyal to President Bashar Assad’s government do not typically use suicide bombers, it appeared likely that forces in the murky mix of opposition fighters in Syria’s 3-year-old civil war were involved. The attack struck a high-level meeting of Ahrar al-Sham, or The Islamic Movement of Free Men of the Levant in English, held in the northwestern town of Ram Hamdan in the Syrian province of Idlib, one of its strongholds. A statement from the group said the blast killed Aboud, also known by the nom de guerre Abu Abdullah al-Hamwi, along with 11 other top leaders.

They were martyred … in an explosion inside their meeting headquarters.

Statement on the Twitter feed of the Islamic Front, the rebel coalition

Ahrar al-Sham was part of the Islamic Front, an alliance of seven powerful conservative and ultraconservative rebel groups that merged in late November. The Islamic Front wants to bring rule by Shariah law in Syria and rejects the Western-backed Syrian National Coalition, but cooperates with some of their fighters on the ground. On Wednesday, U.S. President Barack Obama is expected to lay out a plan to the American people on what course of action should be taken to challenge the Islamic State group, which Ahrar al-Sham opposed.

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