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.
