Hassan Aboud (c. 1981-16 March 2016) was an Islamic State leader. A veteran of the Iraq War and the former leader of the moderate Dawood Brigade, he later betrayed his moderate Islamist stance and joined ISIS during the Syrian Civil War, and he was died on 16 March 2016 from wounds sustained from a roadside bomb attack in Khanaser, Aleppo.
Biography[]
Hassan Aboud was born in Sarmin, Idlib Governorate, Syria to a Sunni Muslim family, and he worked as a mason before the outbreak of the Iraq War. Aboud joined al-Qaeda in the initial stages of the war in Iraq, heading to Anbar Province and fighting alongside the Iraqi insurgents until he later returned home to Syria and served as a mason and a laborer. In 2011, Aboud joined the Syrian Opposition and took part in a failed attack on a Syrian Arab Army convoy, and he formed a large and hardened formation called the "Dawood Brigade" shortly afterwards. The brigade was moderate and focused only on fighting the army, but by late 2013 the group had released instructional videos on becoming a suicide bomber, and he had a brilliant use of the media. In 2014, Aboud defected to the Islamic State with most of the brigade, bringing guns, armored vehicles, and tanks to their new cause. Aboud was a bomb-maker, losing his feet in a firing mishap with improvised rockets, and he was a double amputee. Despite his handicap, Aboud organized an assassination campaign against fellow rebel leaders with whom he had collaborated with before joining ISIS, and he recorded a nasheed song naming people whom he intended to kill and singing about his former rebel allies and townspeople whom he had already murdered. A despised traitor to the Syrian rebels and activists and an admired jihadist, Aboud was himself mortally wounded in March 2016 when his vehicle hit a roadside bomb near Khanaser, Aleppo. On 16 March 2016, he died of his wounds, and his death was announced a month later.