Head of leading Syrian rebel group killed in suicide attack, media reports

The leader of one of Syria's top Islamist groups has been killed, according to Syrian media. Abu Abdullah al-Hamwi was killed in an apparent suicide attack.

The head of one of Syria's largest rebel groups has been killed in a suicide bombing, according to Syrian state news agency SANA.

The group goes by the name Ahrar al-Sham. Its leader Abu Abdullah al-Hamwi, also known as Hassan Aboud, was killed in the northwestern town Ram Hamdan after a suicide bomber detonated an explosives belt during a meeting of the group's leadership. The group said that another 11 of its members died in the attack.

"Ahrar al-Sham had been one of the best led and most organized, and overall, one of the most effective groups on the ground," Noah Bonsey, a Syria analyst at the International Crisis Group, told the Associated Press.

"It's a loss of talent within the rebel spectrum as a whole," Bonsey said. "Ahrar al-Sham was one of the strongest, if not the strongest rebel group, and the question is, what will it look like going forward?"

Ahrar al-Sham is a member of the Islamic Front, a coalition of seven conservative and ultraconservative rebel groups seeking to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad's secular government and impose Shariah law in Syria. The Islamic Front opposes the Western-backed Syrian National Coalition.

Despite its hard-line Islamist ideology, Ahrar al-Sham has fought against the "Islamic State" terror network, which has seized territory across Syria and Iraq and has declared a caliphate.

sb,slk/av (Reuters, AP, dpa)   dw de