BEIRUT — Al-Qaeda fighters killed the leader of a rival brigade in a twin car bombing near Syria's northern city of Aleppo, an attack likely to further exacerbate rebel infighting even as government forces continued their intense shelling of opposition-held areas of the city on Sunday. Syrian aircraft bombed buildings, burying people underneath rubble in the Bab Neirab area, said the Aleppo Media Center. It wasn't immediately clear how many casualties there were. The bombings came after military aircraft dropped barrels packed with explosives over rebel-held areas on Saturday, killing dozens, including an attack that killed 34 people in the rebel-held neighborhood of Al-Bab, said the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The group collates the country's war death toll. Syrian forces have inched into eastern neighborhoods of Aleppo in recent weeks, their most important advance there since rebels fighting to overthrow President Bashar Al-Assad seized the areas in mid-2012. Activists say the troops' advance has been mostly been propelled by military aircraft heavily bombing residential areas, smashing buildings into rubble, forcing civilians and rebels to flee. They've also been assisted by weeks of rebel infighting that has pitted a loose alliance of Syrian fighters against Al-Qaeda linked extremists of the Islamic State of the Iraq and the Levant. Fighting was likely to be exacerbated further after Islamic State fighters undertook a twin suicide bombing that killed 26 people on Saturday, including the military leader of a rebel group. The attack targeted the base of rivals, the Tawheed Brigades, and killed commander Adnan Bakkour, said Rami Abdurrahman of the Observatory. – AP
