
Feel good story of the day.
(Reuters) – A rogue Iraqi offshoot of al Qaeda is now killing more rival al Qaeda fighters every week in Syria than President Bashar al-Assad’s forces as infighting intensifies among opposition gunmen.
Clashes this year between al Qaeda’s official Syria wing, the Nusra Front, and the franchise’s disowned offspring, The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), has killed hundreds of fighters and displaced tens of thousands of civilians.
Nusra lost control of Raqqa – the only rebel-held city in Syria – to ISIL fighters in January and intense fighting over the weekend resulted in ISIL making gains in the eastern province of Deir al-Zor, Syria’s oil region.
If ISIL can take the province, it will control territory across Syria and into Iraq.
Al Qaeda’s leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has repeatedly tried to rein in ISIL and this month he appealed to the group to return to Iraq and redouble its efforts there as sectarian fighting rages. But on Sunday, ISIL’s spokesman, Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, released an audio message rejecting the request.
“About your demand for us to withdraw from Syria, this will not happen and we repeat that this order is impossible,” he said.
The internecine fighting – some of the bloodiest in the war so far – has undermined the uprising against Assad and dismayed world powers anxious to see an end to the three-year-old conflict in which more than 150,000 have been killed.
ISIL follows al Qaeda’s hard-line ideology but draws its strength from foreign fighters, battle-hardened from Iraq.
Both groups, which are hardline Sunni Islamists, fight sectarian battles against Assad, who is supported by his minority Alawite sect – an offshoot of Shi’ite Islam – as well as Shi’ite fighters from Iraq and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.



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