WASHINGTON — (CNN) The commander of one of the most effective rebel forces battling Syria’s government has been killed in an air strike, a monitoring group and Syrian state media reported Friday.
Zahran Alloush, commander of Jaysh al-Islam, and four senior-level officers were killed Thursday when their high-level meeting was bombed by warplanes, the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
It is unclear whether the Syrian military or Russian planes carried out the strike, the group said. Syria’s state-run news agency, SANA, reported it was a Syrian special operation.
Jaysh al-Islam and the powerful umbrella group to which it belongs, the Islamic Front, have not confirmed Alloush’s death.
Syria’s state-run news agency praised the 44-year-old’s death saying “the terrorist Alloush was killed during air raids on terror dens.”
The military chief was a jailed Salafi activist, who after his release from prison in 2011 established a rebel battalion to overthrow the government of President Bashar al-Assad.
The group rose to prominence when it claimed a July 2012 bombing on National Security Headquarters in Damascus that killed a number of top government officials.
When ISIS took parts of Syria, Alloush and his group countered their expansion in some suburbs of Damascus.
Earlier this year, Jaysh al-Islam released a video showing their fighters in orange jumpsuits executing ISIS prisoners.
Alloush has long-been accused of receiving Saudi funding from Salafi fundamentalists.
Jaysh al-Islam, whose fighters number in the thousands, participated earlier this month in the Riyadh conference, which laid the ground work for future Saudi-led peace talks.
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