Syria rebel leader killed in car bombing

A car bombing targeting an influential Syrian rebel group has killed at least 18 people in Quneitra province of the country’s south, as opposition groups elsewhere in Syria accused the government of breaching a truce, Al Jazeera reports.
Late on Wednesday, the car bomb targeted the Syria Revolutionaries Front’s local finance office in al-Ashe, a village on the outskirts of southern Quneitra near the border with the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
Among those killed was the armed group’s leader Muhammad al-Qairi, also known as Abu Hamza al-Naimi, as well as three other leaders, local sources told Al Jazeera.
No group has claimed responsibility for the bombing.
“Unfortunately, civilians who were near by were among those killed,” said Abu Omar al-Jolani, a Quneitra-based media activist who was present at the time of the blast.
In addition to a “metre-deep hole in the street”, the explosion destroyed the SRF’s finance office and badly damaged several nearby residential buildings, he added.
“It was a rough scene. An old man was sitting and crying as he watched people collect his dead brother’s body parts,” Jolani recalled. “I had gone there to film, but I turned off my camera and just started crying with him.”
Jolani’s video footage of the attack’s aftermath was published by Qasioun News, a local Syrian agency.
The SRF is part of the Southern Front, a broad alliance of rebel groups operating in several provinces in southern Syria.
Hamza Mustafa, a research assistant at the Arab Centre for Research and Policy Studies, said the Southern Front had in the past been targeted by both government forces and armed groups, including the al-Nusra Front and its allies.
“Some people are accusing the regime of this attack, but many analysts believe it was Nusra or al-Muthanna,” he told Al Jazeera, referring to an armed group believed to have ties with both the Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.