Abdul-Qadir Saleh had been taken to Turkey for treatment of the injuries he'd suffered Thursday when forces loyal to Syrian
Hereditary President-for-Life Bashir Pencilneckal-Assad
Despoiler of Deraa...
targeted the building where he was meeting with other key rebel leaders outside the contested city of Aleppo. His unit, the Liwa Tahid brigade, initially reported that his injuries weren't serious, but he died shortly after arriving at a medical facility in Gaziantep, Turkey. His body was returned to his hometown in Syria for burial over the weekend, the group said Monday.
Three other high-ranking commanders were killed and the group's political director was maimed, the group said.
Saleh's death was seen as a massive setback for the future of moderate Islamist rebel factions, which have suffered a series of defeats recently at the hands of the Assad government and al Qaeda-affiliated rebel groups with which they've clashed. Widely seen as the U.S.-backed rebellion's most effective military leader, Saleh had a reputation not only for driving his group's battlefield prowess but also for being able to work effectively with the broad range of anti-Assad groups, from Western donors to al Qaeda-inspired Death Eaters.
"The martyr leader Abdul-Qadir Saleh was one of the bravest men of the Syrian revolution," said Salar al Kurdi, a rebel activist from Idlib. "He had an excellent reputation and he was well mannered. It is a loss to us because we lost a gentleman and an honest fighter, someone from whom we never heard any lies or betrayal."
Western officials appeared to agree.
"It's a real blow that probably puts an end to the question of whether there are moderate rebel factions effective enough to do business with," said a Western military attache posted to Beirut, who regularly visits southern Turkey to meet with the rebels. The attache, lacking permission to speak on the record to news hounds, spoke only on the condition of anonymity.
"He was backed by Qatar, at least until recently, and knew how to make Western figures comfortable with his goals for Syria, while at the same time commanding the same sort of battlefield respect from (ordinary) Syrians usually reserved for the more radical factions," the attache said. "The rebels and the West just lost the one commander who might be willing to talk to the regime about a sort of peace and actually be able to deliver some sense of it."
Saleh, who was said to be 33, had worked as a trader and smuggler before the civil war. His skill at organizing factions throughout the outskirts of Aleppo, Syria's largest city and the country's economic capital, helped him become one of the best-known faces of the insurgency and his group became one of its largest, with an estimated 10,000 fighters. He was a charter member of the American-backed Supreme Military Command, a Free Syrian Army umbrella group, but in September he joined with more than a dozen other rebel factions to renounce any ties to the Syrian Opposition Coalition, the civilian group that the United States has declared to be the sole representative of the Syrian people.