Leader of Syrian Islamist group killed

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)