ISIS Takes Down its Last Al Qaeda Rival in Syria

2013122132247544734_20

One of ISIS’ problems in Syria is that unlike Iraq there were two other Al Qaeda groups operating on the ground. One was the Al Nusra Front which had originally been spun off from ISIS. After some fighting, Al Nusra appears to have gotten on board the ISIS express.

The final rival was Ahrar al Sham, the core of the Islamic Front, which appears to be a stealth Al Qaeda organization. Zawahiri’s man in Syria was Abu Khalid al Suri was a top Ahrar al Sham commander, at least until ISIS suicide bombed him.

Now ISIS appears to have suicide bombed its way through the rest of the leadership.

Leaders of Ahrar al Sham, a hard-line Islamist faction, were meeting in the Ram Hamdan area of Idlib province in northern Syria when a suicide bomber detonated a car laden with explosives, killing at least 28 of its leaders, according to various reports. Among the dead was Hassan Abboud, the group’s top commander.

According to Rami Abdul Rahman, head of the pro-opposition watchdog group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the death toll is likely to rise. In an interview with Saudi Arabia’s Al Arabiya news channel, he said about 50 “first- and second-rank leaders” were at the Ram Hamdan meeting.

In January, the Islamic Front, a Saudi-backed umbrella group whose members include Ahrar al Sham, engaged in a wide-scale rout of forces loyal to Islamic State, then known as Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. A month later, three ISIS suicide bombers assassinated Ahrar al Sham’s cofounder, a high-level Al Qaeda operative named Abu Khaled Suri.

On the one hand this is good news. On the other hand, ISIS is forcing every Salafist group under its umbrella, particularly those with Al Qaeda vets running the show. And it’s also sending a message to Obama that despite the air strikes, its plans are moving forward.

ISIS knows that Obama’s strategy, guided by the Saudis and Qatar, is to find moderate Jihadists to ally with. It intends to ensure that there are no alternative groups to it left standing.

  • objectivefactsmatter

    That’s how it works. It’s the law of the jihadi jungle.

    • Texas Patriot

      But it usually doesn’t work so efficiently or so well. I read that 75 of the group’s top leaders were trapped in a room no windows, and almost everyone died from smoke inhalation within ten minutes of the initial explosion. Apparently the only survivor is now in critical condition.

      • objectivefactsmatter

        It doesn’t matter who lives as long as it’s not the reformers or any serious “moderate.”

        • Texas Patriot

          It’s a little bit hard to keep up with the jihadis’ game of musical chairs, but I think these guys may have been the “freedom fighters” John McCain wanted to arm and support.

      • http://sultanknish.blogspot.com Daniel Greenfield

        They clearly had the inside track here.

        • Texas Patriot

          Obviously superior intelligence makes all the difference, and in this case ISIS had it. It’s a complex mosaic, and the best way to respond to it is still not clear to me.

          In the larger scheme of things it’s a Shia-Sunni conflict, and we should probably avoid taking sides in that. As Benjamin Netanyahu said, stay out of it, and work to weaken both sides. This little incident today was merely a mater of Khalifa Ibrahim taking out rival factions and consolidating his power within the Sunni coalition . I don’t see that it really affects us one way or the other.

          On the other hand, I’m somewhat concerned that Obama will announce a strategy tomorrow night that does involve active cooperation with Iran and the Shia dominated government of Iraq. I’d rather have “no strategy” than the wrong one.

          Watch and wait is not such a bad plan if you’re enemies are killing one another and you’re not sure which one presents the biggest threat to you..

          • http://sultanknish.blogspot.com Daniel Greenfield

            It affects us because a major enemy grouping is consolidating and uniting. And because they keep getting better at what they do which will become a problem when they begin targeting us in earnest.

          • Texas Patriot

            Well then you may be very happy with Obama’s speech tomorrow night as he is apparently announcing plans for a coalition to degrade, dismantle, and destroy ISIS sooner rather than later.

  • jak

    “Moderate jihadist”? Is that like “jumbo shrimp”?

    • http://sultanknish.blogspot.com Daniel Greenfield

      As usual, moderate goes in quotation marks. It’s the view of Obama and the EU

  • http://libertyandculture.blogspot.com/ Jason P

    Hmmm. Jihadists are unified and Saudi-back jihadist eliminated. Hmmm. Saudi Arabia builds a wall to protect itself from the Islamic State. Hmmm. Could al-Baghdadi be thinking of a replay of the Grand Mosque seizure of 1979 when jihadists tried to oust the House of Saud as guardians of Mecca? Could any self-respecting Caliph not want Mecca?

    This is getting interesting.

  • truebearing

    The night of the long scimitars…these ISIS guys have some reach. Their success will be the recruiting tool that the Left idiotically asserted George Bush was. ISIS will attract jihadis like a magnet. Then Obama will see how much the strength and cunning to inflict death means to the devout Muslim barbarian.

  • RMThoughts

    Yet, our game plan is to fund, arm and support the Muslim moderates in Syria against ISIS.Obama wants the United States to go after ISIS, but doesn’t tell us where ISIS originated. If Obama goes after ISIS in Iraq, that means he has to go after ISIS in Syria. “The U.S. and its allies are trying to hammer out a coalition to push back the Islamic State group in Iraq. But any serious attempt to destroy the militants or even seriously degrade their capabilities means targeting their infrastructure in Syria.”

    If Obama does that, then logically he and other political figures would invariably have to join forces with Assad, who has been fighting factions of ISIS since the beginning of time. And if he joins forces with Assad, then that means the United States has spent millions upon millions of dollars supporting the Syrian rebels/jihadists seeking to overthrow Assad for nothing!

    If the U.S. joins Assad, ISIS would be defeated in a matter of weeks or days. But that would logically lead to the big WHY the neoconservative policy of United States supported the Syrian rebels, and that would lead to the inevitable conclusions that the so-called war on terror is only a sham to further geo-political goals.

    Amazingly, we see no neoconservative advocating United States to ally with Syria or Russia, in the theory “the enemy of our enemy is necessarily our friend.” In other words, we should never ally with Russia or Syria or Iran in order to defeat ISIS. Retired General McInerney admits in a widely viewed interview that the United States indeed helped built ISIS. Until the neoconservative/Neo-Bolsheviks foreign policy establishment in Washington take some blame for the chaos in Syria and Iraq how can take “fighting ISIS” seriously?

  • Pete

    I thought ISIS and the Assad regime have had ‘agreements’ to not attack each other in some places in the past. This would free up forces so they could go after other groups.

    Seems like there is a dearth of these other groups now and they have only each other to confront.

    Up Up the Volume!

  • Pete