Two people were killed and 12 injured Sunday by bombardment of a church as it was being inaugurated in Syria’s central province of Hama, the official SANA news agency reported.

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Sunday’s attack came two days after bombardment killed seven people including four children in the rebel-held Idlib region.

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Around half of Idlib province as well as parts of Aleppo, Hama and Latakia provinces are controlled by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the former franchise in Syria of al-Qaeda.

Attack on Syria church gathering kills 2

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HTS: Evolution of a Jihadi Group

Abu Mohammed al Jolani, the nom de guerre of Ahmed Hussein al Shara, is the controversial HTS leader. He was born in 1982. After the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, he joined the insurgency against U.S. forces led by al Qaeda in neighboring Iraq. He returned to Syria after the uprising against Assad erupted in 2011. In 2012, he announced the creation of Jabhat al Nusra, or the Nusra Front.

How Washington is positioning Syrian Al-Qaeda’s founder as its ‘asset’

Whether or not he realized it, when [Martin] Smith returned to Syria this March to meet Jolani, he was on more than a journalistic field expedition. A network of think tanks and Beltway foreign policy veterans were engaged in a simultaneous push to remove Jolani and his militant faction HTS from the State Department’s list of designated terrorist groups.

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The campaign to normalize Jolani was publicly initiated by the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank with close ties to the Biden administration and NATO. By the time of Smith’s interview, operatives from a network of Gulf-funded, pro-Israel think tanks had spent years quietly lobbying for Washington to support al-Qaeda’s Syrian franchise, and succeeded in securing shipments of weapons from the CIA to some of its battlefield allies.