Militant groups kill 7 in attacks in Syria

At least seven people were killed in separate incidents in central and southern Syria on Thursday, including members of the National Reconciliation Committee, the official SANA news agency reported.
Ammar al-Khatib, a member of the National Reconciliation Committee, was assassinated at the town of Tal in the countryside of the capital Damascus along with his 14-year-old son and a passerby, said SANA, adding that the assassins lurked for al- Khatib near the al-Basha Mosque in the Tal town.
The assassins opened fire on the man and his son on the spot, killing them immediately along with another passerby who happened to be there at the time of the shooting.
The assassination of al-Khatib came just hours after another member of the National Reconciliation Committee, Mohammed Marwan Hammudeh, was assassinated in the Damascus' suburb of Qudsaya.
The National Reconciliation Committee has been tasked with establishing reconciliation with the armed rebels, who are desirous of dropping their weapons in exchange for amnesty. Their efforts have largely succeeded in many hotspots in Syria, mainly in the outskirts of Damascus and the central city of Homs.
In the central province of Hama, armed militant groups killed three women in the southern countryside of Hama and mutilated their bodies on Thursday, according to SANA.
The armed groups infiltrated into the town Taqsis, killing the three women, who were members of one family, and beheading them afterwards, according to SANA.
The violence is the latest in a series of endless chaos the Syrian crisis has produced over the past three years, where more than 100,000 people were killed and millions of others were displaced.