Hassan Abboud and around 20 other top commanders from the Islamist rebel group Ahrar Ash Sham have been killed in a suicide bomb blast.
The men were engaged in a meeting in the village of Ram Hamdanthe in the Iblib region, when activists say they were targeted with a suicide bomb in Idlib.
Other men named as killed in the attack include Abu Yazan al-Shami, a member of the group’s shura council; Abu al-Zubeir, the head of the Iman brigade; and Abu Talha al-Askari and Abu Yousuf Binnish, who were military field commanders.
Ahrar ash-Sham, which translates as the “Islamic Movement of the Free Men of the Levant”, is a coalition of Islamist and Salafist units that include 10-20,000 fighters.
The group are considered one of the more moderate jihadist groups fighting in Syria, that aims to create an replace the government of Bashar al-Assad with an Islamic state that respects religious and ethnic freedoms and the rights of women.
These aims contrast with those of Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, with which they have clashed on a number of occasions and are rumoured to be behind the attack.
Al Jazeera recently interviewed Hassan Abboud about Ahrar Ash Sham’s plans for Syria
