Syrian rebel leaders die in air strike

[Eugene]

Source: BBC

Syrian rebel leaders die in air strike

25 December 2015 Middle East

The head and several leaders of one of Syria's most powerful rebel groups, Jaysh al-Islam, have been killed in an air strike east of Damascus.

Founder Zahroun Alloush, 44, was among those killed when rockets hit a meeting place, rebels and the Syrian army said.

The Saudi-backed Islamist group is one of the biggest factions and is dominant in the Eastern Ghouta countryside.

It recently joined an opposition summit in Riyadh which produced a framework for peace talks with the government.

Ten rockets struck as Jaysh al-Islam commanders met, Saudi-funded al-Arabiya TV reported. The group's deputy leader was also killed, al-Arabiya said.

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Read more: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-35178684

[Jesus Malverde]

1. Nice..nt

[bemildred]

2. What does Zahran Alloush's death tell us?

I am wondering who ratted them out?



The leader and founder of the Syrian Salafi group Jaish al-Islam, Zahran Alloush, was killed in an air strike east of the capital Damascus while in a meeting with other armed Syrian groups on Friday. At least ten rockets reportedly struck the meeting.

It is not immediately clear whether or not this air strike was Syrian or Russian. Jaish al Islam’s largest footholds in Syria are in Eastern Ghouta and Douma. All near and around Damascus, areas the Syrian regime is launching an offensive to retake with close Russian air support. Meaning this aerial assassination could well have been carried out by Russian aircraft.

Jaish al-Islam is one of the Salafi groups that Saudi Arabia supports in the Syrian war against the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Its Salafi ideology is quite extreme and is indeed not dissimilar from the root ISIS’s radicalism stems from. Alloush initially made no bones about it, he sought to replace Assad with a non-democratic Islamist order, deeming democracy to be a corrupt form of governance.

However, perhaps as a ploy to win western support against Assad, he would later change his tune claiming a post-Assad Syria would be a representative Syria. Even for the Alawite minority from which the Assad family hails, a religious minority that Salafis deem to be unforgivably heretical. Alloush even went as far as to claim that many of his own pronouncements were rhetoric, to win over youths with extreme Salafist ISIS-like views to his side as opposed to ISIS’s.

http://rudaw.net/english/middleeast/26122015

[bemildred]

3. Zahran Alloush headed the anti-regime group Army of Islam

The leader of one of the largest rebel groups fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime was killed Friday in an airstrike on the outskirts of Damascus, imperiling a fragile new plan backed by the U.N. to restart peace talks.

A Syrian army general said in a televised statement that the regime’s air force bombed a rebel command center in the eastern suburbs and killed Zahran Alloush, leader of the group known as the Army of Islam, and several of his associates. He called them all “terrorists.”

But opposition activists as well as the media arm of the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah—an Assad ally playing a leading role in battles in the Damascus area—said a Russian airstrike killed Mr. Alloush and the others. Russia intervened in the Syria war in September to prop up the Assad regime.

Even as the regime was bombing rebels in the eastern suburbs of Damascus and in a town to the southwest, it was making preparations to expand a cease-fire in the southern outskirts of a capital surrounded by the chaos of the war.

http://www.syriahr.com/en/?p=41317