Free Syrian Army (FSA) commanders have reportedly threatened that the recent assassination of the group's senior official would spark further bloodshed and violence between mainstream Syrian opposition and foreign anti-Assad fighters
Kamal Hamami, a member of the opposition's supreme military command, was killed and his body mutilated after he was lured to a planned meeting with fighters believed to be foreign jihadists, the Guardian reports.
Rebel leaders in northern Syria said on Friday that the assassination had shattered trust between the two sides and set off a blood feud between the disparate factions battling to oust the president, Bashar al-Assad.
Former officer of the Syrian army said that the act of assassination will not go unpunished adding that the jihadists are trying to assert themselves, to make the Syrian Army bow to them and they need to be taught a lesson.
A rebel leader in Aleppo said that he knew Syria will become like Anbar, where al-Qaeda was driven out in 2006 after earning the ire of local hosts and added that it is now a land of warlords and clans, of foreigners with a perverse form of Islam that share neither their views or goals.
Jabhat al-Nusra members said that their leaders had learned from past mistakes, especially in Anbar, where overplaying attempts to impose and enforce a strict interpretation of sharia law meant they lost the trust of the tribes.
A report on the Syrian crisis from the International Crisis Group said that the war is metastasising in ways that draw in regional and other international actors, erase boundaries and give rise to a single, transnational arc of crisis.