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Hussein Suleiman, a commander in Ahrar Al-Sham, one of the country’s biggest rebel groups, had gone to negotiate with leaders of the ultra-conservative Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) about a local dispute in Maskanah, near Aleppo.

His dead body was later returned to comrades with an ear missing and visible signs of torture.

The Islamic Front, an alliance of Islamist groups including Ahrar Al-Sham, condemned the killing and attacked ISIS strongholds in the north in retaliation.

“They kidnapped him and tortured him and then killed him and disfigured his corpse, in a way unknown to the Syrian people prior to the revolution, even when it came to the branches of the criminal Assad regime’s security bodies,” said a statement from the Islamic Front.

Hassan Aboud, the political leader of the group, told Al Jazeera, “ISIS denies reality, refusing to recognize that it is simply another group. It refuses to go to independent courts; it attacked many other groups, stole their weapons, occupied their headquarters and arbitrarily apprehended numerous activists, journalists and rebels. It has been torturing its prisoners. These transgressions accumulated and people got fed up with ISIS. Some of those people have attacked ISIS’s positions, but ISIS was first to attack in other places, bringing this on itself.”

Widespread anger at the repressive and arbitrary nature of ISIS’s methods has been growing since the group’s arrival in northern Syria in May 2013 to fight the regime of Bashar Al-Assad. Many of the Islamist groups want the formation of an Islamic state in Syria. But ISIS goes further, calling for the restoration of the caliphate, an Islamic kingdom, across the Levant, a vast swathe of the eastern Mediterranean.