Blast Kills Head, Top Leaders of Rebel Group in Syria

Hassan Abboud, the leader of an ultraconservative Syrian Islamic rebel group Ahrar al-Sham, was killed Tuesday along with other top commanders in a suicide bombing.

The Edlib News Network said that more than 40 people were killed in the blast.

Activists stated that a suicide bomber had detonated a vest in the attack in the north-western town of Ram Hamdan, BBC reports. No group has yet claimed responsibility for the attack, Associated Press reports.

However, the Islamic State was blamed in February when a suicide bomb attack in Ahrar al-Sham's headquarters in Aleppo had killed another leader Abu Khaled al-Suri.

An organisation that monitors violence in the civil war said that at least 28 of the group's leaders had died and this loss of top officials has weakened the ranks of the country's already unstable armed opposition. According to Reuters, Ahrar al-Sham is a hardline Islamist group that is part of the Islamic Front alliance, a coalition of seven Islamist rebel groups, which opposes the ideology and actions of the Islamic State.

In an interview with BBC in June, Abboud had condemned the IS and said that it was representing "the worst image ever of Islam".

Ahrar al-Sham's official Twitter feed stated the blast had hit a high-level meeting in Idlib province in northwest Syria and confirmed Hassan Aboud, the group's leader, was one of the at least 12 dead.

"They were martyred ... in an explosion inside their meeting headquarters," read the Twitter feed of the Islamic Front.

"We don't know the cause of the explosion yet," Abu Mustafa al-Absi, a member of Ahrar al-Sham's politburo told Al-Jazeera. "We do not rule out the infiltration of elements who were able to plant a bomb," he added.