
Abu Firas al-Suri (1949-3 April 2016), born Radwan Nammous, is a spokesman of the Al-Nusra Front. He was an acquaintance of Osama bin Laden and Abdullah Azzam since the Soviet-Afghan War, and he fought in the Afghanistan War and Syrian Civil War for al-Qaeda afterwards. al-Suri was killed in an airstrike in Idlib Governorate on 3 April 2016.
Biography[]
Radwan Nammous was born in 1949 in the countryside of Damascus Governorate, Syria. He attended the Military University of Damascus and became a 2nd Lieutenant, but his Islamist views led to him being dismissed from the Syrian Arab Army in 1979. From 1979 to 1980 he fought against the Syrian regime of Hafez al-Assad alongside Islamist Muslim Brotherhood rebels and from 1980 he fought in the Soviet-Afghan War in Afghanistan with the Mujahideen, having moved his residence to Jordan. In 1983, Nammous met Abdullah Azzam and Osama bin Laden during the Soviet-Afghan War, helping in the training of Mujahideen. After the war, Nammous worked with families of Pakistani Mujahideen during the United States' invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and in 2003 he fled to Yemen after helping in the creation of Lashkar-e-Taiba.
Syrian Civil War[]

Abu Firas al-Suri and his son Abu Asim shortly before their deaths in 2016
In 2013, he headed to Syria during the Syrian Civil War, becoming a spokesman for the Al-Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda splintergroup; he took on the nom de guerre of "Abu Firas al-Suri". Soon, the Dawla put Abu Firas on their blacklist and he was with Abu Khaled al-Suri moments before he died in 2014. On 28 September 2014, he issued a statement vowing vengeance against the nations allied with the United States in their bombing campaign in Syria and Iraq against the Al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State that killed Abu Khaled and many other leaders of the two groups. On 3 April 2016, al-Suri himself was believed to have been killed in a Syrian or Russian Air Force airstrike in Idlib Governorate with 20 other al-Nusra fighters, and the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights (SOHR) confirmed online claims that he was killed.