And if there is one thing jihadists excel at it’s ruthlessly killing opponents.
Via Daily Beast:
A top Free Syrian Army commander’s slaying by al Qaeda-linked jihadists is just the latest in a string of murders that has triggered a defection crisis in the Western-backed opposition.
Last weekend, Al-Qaeda-affiliated fighters in northern Syria executed a prominent moderate rebel commander—a slaying that has exacerbated divisions between Islamic militants and degraded morale inside the beleaguered Western-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA), which is facing a defection crisis.
The slaying of Ammar al-Wawi by jihadists linked to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shams, or ISIS, is the latest in a series of targeted abductions and assassinations of leading moderate rebels. FSA sources say they suspect that al-Wawi was executed on Saturday after being cornered three days earlier, along with three of his men, near Bab al-Hawa as he crossed back into Syria from Turkey.
A few days before his abduction, fighters with the newly-formed Islamic Front seized FSA weapons storehouses at Bab al-Hawa. The Front has no official ties with the al-Qaeda fighters—who see the Syrian civil war as part of their global jihad—but it shares much of their hardline ideology and several of the seven brigades that make up the Islamic Front have fought alongside jihadists in the past.
Al-Wawi, a former Syrian government intelligence officer who defected to the rebel cause in July 2011, was a regular interlocutor with the international media, often serving as the FSA’s spin-doctor in videos uploaded to YouTube and in interviews with Arabic-language television channels.