The attack on Friday came a day following the abduction by al-Nusra militants of eight terrorists from the anti-Damascus so-called Division 30 armed group, which had been trained and supplied by the US military, said the so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) in a statement.
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Isis splintered from the al-Nusra Front in 2013 after a public feud between the two groups’ leaders in which Zawahiri attempted to intervene. The opposition source said they were abducted on Tuesday night. Warplanes of the US-led coalition bombed the Nusra positions near Azaz, north of Aleppo.
It said at least 18 Nusra Front fighters had been killed in the strikes and ground fighting, while seven rebel fighters had died in the clashes.
Another rebel group in the area said it had also clashed with Nusra Front.
A representative of “Division 30” said reports that the group was Western-backed were likely the reason behind the kidnapping.
The Nusra Front, in a statement released late Friday, acknowledged it had taken the group’s members as well as the bombings on its headquarters.
Islamic State group (IS/ISIS) targeted headquarters of al-Nusra Front (al-Qaeda branch in Syria) with a auto bomb attack in the northern countryside of Aleppo on Wednesday.
While the US Department of Defence, which runs a “train and equip” programme for rebels deemed suitably moderate, has denied that any of its graduates were captured, US officials have previously confirmed that Division 30 is involved with the scheme, and that trained fighters crossed back into Syria earlier this month. “(Thus) it was the incumbent on the Al-Nusra Front to investigate and take caution of such projects, so we arrested a number of soldiers that band”.
On Thursday, Al Nusra kidnapped eight of them – including a commander – from a village in the province of Aleppo, the Observatory said. The Pentagon has said however that no members of the “New Syrian Force” had been captured or detained.
Earlier in July, the coalition attacked 16 bridges in and near the northern Syrian city of Raqqa, the Islamic State group’s de facto capital, in order to prevent the extremists from moving military capabilities in Syria and Iraq. Fewer than 60 have recently entered Syria.
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The Assad government, which uses aircraft to attack opposition forces relatively nearby, was warned by the administration – through a previously used conduit at the Syrian United Nations mission in New York – to stay away from where the trained fighters were inserted, another U.S. official said.
