Ahrar ash-Sham
The group was founded by eleven Islamist rebel groups on 21 December 2012, including: Ahrar ash-Sham, Al-Haqq Brigade in Homs, the Al-Fajr Islamic Movement in Aleppo, Ansar al-Sham in Latakia, Jaysh Al-Tawhid in Deir ez-Zor and the Hamza ibn 'Abd al-Muttalib Brigade in Damascus. In January 2013 several of the member organisations announced that they were uniting with Ahrar ash-Sham into a broader group called Harakat Ahrar al-Sham al-Islamiyya (The Islamic Movement of Ahrar al-Sham). In April 2013, the Haqq Battalions Gathering of Hama Governorate became the first new member to join the Front since its founding, in August 2013 this group was merged with several other Salafist rebel groups in Hama to form a new SIF member unit called Liwa Mujahidi al-Sham. The SIF did not include the jihadist Al-Nusra Front, which had been declared a terrorist organisation by the United States. On 9 August, SOHR reported that Hassan Aboud, the head of Ahrar ash-Sham, an ultraconservative Syrian rebel group, was killed in the northwestern town of Ram Hamdan in the Syrian of Idlib Governorate.