|
|
Rebels clashed with an opposition unit linked to Al Qaeda in northern Syria, activists said yesterday, in a deadly battle that signals growing divisions among rebel groups and rising tensions between locals and more radical Islamist factions.
The rebel infighting comes as forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad have made gains on the battlefield and drawn comfort from the downfall this week of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which under ousted president Mohamed Mursi had thrown its weight behind the Syrian opposition.
The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), a new Al Qaeda franchise, has been working to cement power in rebel-held parts of northern Syria in recent months.
ISIS units have begun to impose stricter interpretations of Islamic law and have filmed themselves executing members of rival rebel groups whom they accuse of corruption, and beheading those they say are loyal to Assad.
As fighting drags on and resources grow scarce, infighting has increased both among opposition groups and militias loyal to Assad, leaving civilians trapped in the middle.
The latest internecine clashes happened in the town of Al Dana, near the Turkish border, on Friday, local activists said. An opposition group known as the Free Youths of Idlib said dozens of fighters were killed, wounded or imprisoned.
A report from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition monitoring group, said that the bodies of a commander and his brother, from the local Islam Battalion, were found beheaded. Local activists working for the British-based group said the men’s heads were found next to a trash bin in a main square.
The exact reasons for the clashes have been hard to pin down, but many rebel groups have been chafing at ISIS’s rise in power. It has subsumed the once dominant Nusra Front, a more localised group of Al Qaeda-linked fighters that had resisted calls by foreign radicals to expand its scope beyond the Syrian revolt to a more regional Islamist mission.
Residents of rebel-held territories in the north once welcomed hardline Islamist groups, even those linked to Al Qaeda which often included radical foreign militants with experience of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Town leaders would say the hardline groups were better organised, less corrupt and set up administrative councils to keep electricity running and food supplies coming in.
But locals are growing more wary of the groups, particularly ISIS, as they impose their austere interpretations of Islamic law. Some say the groups have beaten or executed residents seen as defying them.