Monday, February 24, 2014

Who is al-Qaeda's Abu Khaled al Souri?

I just read this interesting bio of Abu Khaled al Souri posted on the rebel website of Kuluna Shurakaa. Here is a quick translation.  Abu Khaled al-Suri died last week  in a bomb attack in Aleppo . The rebel Ahrar al Sham accused  the Islamic state of Iraq and Syria, ( ISIS) of the killing of the al-Qaeda leader.

Abu Khaled al-Suri  was a point of reference for all Syrian Jihadists with the exception of ISIS . He is also know as Omair al-Shami and  spent nearly forty years crisscrossing Jihadi theaters from  Afghanistan Bosnia , Chechnya, Iraq to  Syria. The man was believed to be one of the first brothers of arms of Sheikh Abdullah Azzam ,  one of the founders of Jihad in Afghanistan before becoming the  lieutenant for Al-Qaeda’s  founder Osama bin Laden  in Peshawar. He then moved to Chechnya where we fought,  before combating in Iraq alongside Abu Musab al-Zarqawi  where he also met   Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, the current leader of ISIS. The article states that he was imprisoned in Syria and was set free by regime forces in 2011 after the revolution started.  It seems that Al-Qaeda’s current leader  Ayman al-Zawahiri asked Abou Khaled to settle disputes between  ISIS and the Nusra Front led by Abou Mohamad al-Joulani. He was also supposed to join the Nusra Front, a proposal that was rejected by ISIS, in the backdrop of clashes between al-Qaeda in Iraq and Syria and the various Islamic factions including the Nusra Front. The article reports that Abu Khaled was very critical of ISIS’s actions which he accused of being manipulated by intelligence services and delegitimizing the jihadi movement.  ISIS threatened Abu Khaled al-Souri of killing him using five suicide bombers, a threat that came to fruition last week.