Orient Net - Mehmet Solmaz
The leader of a pro-regime Shabiha group and one of the main suspects of a twin car bombing attack in southern Turkey, Mihrac Ural, was killed by opposition group Ahrar al-Sham.
Abu Yusuf al Muhajir, a spokesman for the Ahrar al-Sham group, said that they targeted a military convoy which belonged to the regime on Tuesday in Latakia where the presence of the regime forces have intensified recently.
"Our forces shelled a military convoy which was passing through the Prophet Yunus Hill in Latakia. After a while ambulances were sent back to the district from the scene. Two hours later we learned that, Ali Kayali also known as Mihrac Ural was killed along with some regime and Russian military officers during the attack," he said. Hours later, pro-regime figures also confirmed the incident on their social media accounts.
Ural was the leader of a terrorist organization in Turkey’s Hatay province called the Turkish Peoples’ Liberation Party-Front Acilciler (The Urgent Ones). Ural, a Turkish Alawite who is also a Syrian citizen and has family ties with Bashar al-Assad due to his wife, has sought to agitate Hatay’s sizable Alawite population for a confrontation with the Turkish state. After this move failed to find support within Turkish territories, Ural recruited local Alawites to fight in Syria on behalf of the regime under his militia group called The Syrian Resistance (Al Muqawamat al-Suriyah).
The Shabiha commander who led some 5,000 militia, has a long history of terrorism but the latest attack carried out under his commands were the most publicized ones. After leaving Turkey for Syria in 1982, he had close relations with Hafez al-Assad’s younger brother, Jamil al-Assad and carried out dirty works of the regime in efforts of suppressing critics.
Ural was behind one of the cruelest massacres in Syria. In May 2013, Ural and his militia group first raided the Bayda Village and later the Banias city of Tartus Governate, killing hundreds of people, including many children and women. The group did not only indiscriminately killed innocent people but also torched houses and bombarded Bayda from the sea with rockets before entering into the village. He was also behind the Houla massacre that claimed lives of 108 people according to the U.N., which said 83 of those killed were women and children.
He was also the mastermind behind the car bombings which took place in Reyhanli district of Turkey’s southern Hatay Province in 2013, killing at least 52 people and injuring 142 others. Five other suspects fled to Syria after conducting the deadly attacks, prosecutors’ reports show.
In the recent months, Ural focused his terror to Latakia and raided many Turkmen villages near Turkey border and only four days before being killed, he mocked the Turkish intelligence on his Twitter account. "MIT [Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization] has gone crazy about who to pay the ransom of 1 million dollar. Forty people are wandering about and many units on the job. We’re mocking with them all. They’re in our palms," his tweet read.
Ural has experienced the expected fate of a tyrant. Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani, Hezbollah’s Nasrallah and Assad regime will soon or later pay the price for their cruelty against the Syrian people.
