Terrorists Clash with New Al-Qaeda terror Group in Syria

Rebels clashed with an opposition unit linked to al-Qaeda in Northern Syria, in a deadly battle that signals growing divisions among terrorist groups and rising tensions between locals and more radical factions.
The rebel infighting comes as forces loyal to President Bashar 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 Morsi had thrown its weight behind the Syrian opposition.

The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), the new al-Qaeda franchise announced by the head of global network’s Iraq leader, has been quickly working to cement power in rebel-held territories of Northern Syria in recent months.

ISIS units have filmed themselves executing members of rival rebel groups whom they accuse of corruption, and beheading those they say are loyal to Assad.

Syria’s two-year unrests has degenerated from a peaceful protest movement into a bloody civil war that has killed more than tens of thousands of people due to the meddling of the US and its western and Arab allies.

As fighting drags on and resources grow scarce, infighting has increased among opposition groups, JPost said.

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 reason 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 localized group of al-Qaeda-linked fighters