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 BEIRUT, Lebanon — The leader of the Nusra Front, an affiliate of Al Qaeda in Syria, on Tuesday proposed an initiative aimed at halting the worst infighting yet between the armed opponents of President Bashar al-Assad since the start of the conflict nearly three years ago. 
 
 Deadly battles have raged in recent days across northern Syria between rebel forces and another Qaeda affiliate, known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, that also wants to depose Mr. Assad’s government but aims to replace it with a monolithic Sunni extremist government that rules both countries. 
 
 Angered by what they call the tendency of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria to commandeer resources, impose strict social codes, and kidnap and kill opponents, rebel groups have been attacking its bases and trying to drive out its fighters from towns and villages where they once held sway. 
 
 More than 270 people had been killed in four days of fighting as of Monday, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition group based in Britain with a network of contacts in Syria. The dead include 46 civilians, 129 rebel fighters and 99 fighters for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Both sides have also executed prisoners, the Syrian Observatory said. 
 
 In an audio recording released online on Tuesday, the head of the Nusra Front, known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, said the infighting resulted from the “incorrect policies” of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. He called for a cease-fire and the establishment of an Islamic court to handle disputes, saying the violence could give Mr. Assad’s forces the opportunity to regain territory. 
 
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 “The whole battlefield, including the foreign and local fighters, will pay the price of losing a great jihad because the regime will rebound when it was so close to vanishing,” he said. 
 
 While rebel forces have in the past established Islamic courts to administer individual towns and villages, the movement has never had a unified leadership that could impose discipline. 
 
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 The authenticity of the Nusra Front leader’s statement could not be immediately confirmed. 
 
 The Syrian Observatory has reported that more than 130,000 people have been killed since the conflict began in March 2011. But the United Nations, which has been saying for months that the death toll has exceeded 100,000, announced on Tuesday that it had decided to stop updating its own tally, at least for the foreseeable future, because of the problems in verifying information. 
 
 “It was always very close to the edge in terms of how much we could guarantee the source material was accurate,” Rupert Colville, a spokesman for the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, told reporters in Geneva. He partly attributed the decision to the extremely limited ability of the United Nations to independently conduct fact-finding in Syria, making it “increasingly difficult for us to source and analyze the casualty figures in order to update them.” 
 
 Suspension of a United Nations update on casualties “will be a loss — we will now have only disparate sources of information,” said Hamit Dardagan, an author of a report on Syrian casualties by the Oxford Research Group, a London-based organization that put the toll at 113,700 as of November. 
 
 Mr. Dardagan, a founder of Iraq Body Count, a project begun in 2003 to record civilian casualties from the war in Iraq, also said the sectarian nature of the Syrian crisis would further complicate any data collection. “As any conflict intensifies and you have more refugee flows and more people displaced, that becomes more difficult,” he said in an interview. 
 
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 The number of nongovernmental organizations able to work in Syria has been reduced by the increasing violence. Civilian groups that report events considered unfavorable to any of the warring parties have been targeted; most recently, Razan Zeitouneh, a rights activist who ran the Violations Documentation Center, and her colleagues were abducted from their office in a Damascus suburb. Parties on both sides also actively filter information they provide to the outside world to help their cause, and government restrictions and the threat of kidnapping and death have severely limited access for journalists. 
 
 United Nations agencies that do have some access have also described problems in verifying data. Officials with the World Food Program and the World Health Organization in Damascus said recently that because their officials could not reach many areas in Syria, they had set up local contacts to relay information to them, but that verification was difficult. Government ministries provide some data, but they are out of touch with branches in some rebel-held areas. 
 
 The United Nations reported some progress on Tuesday in the international effort to purge Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile. In a statement issued with the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, it said the first batch of the most dangerous materials in the stockpile had been exported from the country, loaded onto a Danish commercial vessel in the Syrian port of Latakia. 
 
 The statement said the Danish vessel would remain at sea until the second cargo of chemicals reached Latakia, when it would return to load them. The vessel was escorted by Danish and Norwegian naval vessels, the statement said, and China and Russia were providing further maritime security for the operation. 
 
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 “This movement initiates the process of transfer of chemical materials from the Syrian Arab Republic to locations outside its territory for destruction,” said the statement by Sigrid Kaag, the United Nations official responsible for coordinating the effort. 
 
 The export and destruction of the most dangerous substances in the Syrian arsenal, which the statement called “priority chemical materials,” has long been considered the trickiest and most hazardous part of the operation, which Syria agreed to carry out as part of its pledge more than three months ago to renounce chemical weapons and join the treaty that bans them. 
 
 Under a Security Council resolution approved Sept. 27, all of Syria’s chemical weapons must be destroyed by the middle of 2014. The most dangerous chemicals were supposed to have been exported from the country by Dec. 31, but that stage of the operation was delayed because the war had made their overland transport to Latakia too dangerous to complete. ||||| A merger between terrorist groups spells even more trouble for Syrians caught in the middle. By Jamie Dettmer. 
 
 Syrians battling to oust President Bashar al-Assad shouldn’t settle for democracy as the reward for their sacrifices but should embrace strict Islamic sharia law when the Syrian regime has been finally defeated, says the emir of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi. 
 
 In a recorded audio message lasting 20 minutes and released yesterday to jihadi websites, Al-Baghdadi acknowledged that Al Qaeda has been involved in the fighting in Syria, confirming that the Jihadist group Jabhat al-Nusra, which has become one of the most effective and disciplined rebel formations in the civil war, is an extension of Al Qaeda in Iraq, otherwise known as the Islamic State of Iraq. 
 
 Al-Nusra, which has launched more than 40 successful bombing attacks against mainly government military targets, often using suicide bombers, has been tagged a terrorist organization by the Obama administration because of its links with al-Qaeda. It has been enjoying growing cachet among Syrian rebels from recent operational accomplishments on the battlefield and has been in the vanguard of many successful full-scale rebel clashes with Assad forces. 
 
 Al-Baghdadi says that al-Nusra’s ties with Al Qaeda were kept obscure for security reasons and to provide Syrians the opportunity to judge the jihadist fighters through their own eyes as opposed through the filter of a biased international media that would immediately have dismissed them. 
 
 According to the Al Qaeda leader, there were already jihadist cells in Syria before the conflict erupted. These cells were “awaiting the chance” to expand their operations and when the civil war started Abu Muhammad Al-Julani was dispatched along with other Iraqi jihadists to establish al-Nusra and to set strategy. Al Qaeda in Iraq has been splitting its funds with al-Nusra, he says. 
 
 His boast will be seized on by the Assad regime, which has consistently spun the propaganda line that the rebellion is a foreign conspiracy relying on terrorists and foreign Jihadist fighters. 
 
 The evidence on the ground is that al-Nusra has been able to swell its ranks with homegrown fighters as well foreigners drawn from elsewhere in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia and with a sprinkling from Europe. 
 
 The Obama administration, which took major criticism from Syrian rebels for tagging al-Nusra a terrorist organization, will likely highlight al-Baghdadi’s remarks as final justification for its desgination. 
 
 Al-Baghdadi is a highly effective if brutal leader. He has been responsible for directing large-scale operations in Iraq such as the August 28, 2011 attack on the Umm al-Qura mosque in Baghdad that killed prominent Sunni lawmaker Khalid al-Fahdawi. He has had deep experience in setting up jihadist groups and organized the flow of fighters from Syria and elsewhere into Iraq, a recruitment process that strengthened Al Qaeda in Iraq, say U.S. intelligence sources. He became the emir of Al Qaeda in Iraq in 2010. 
 
 On December 2, 2012 Iraqi officials claimed that they had captured him in Baghdad following a two-month-long investigation but later admitted they had lifted a less important jihadist leader. Al Baghdadi became notorious before taking over the Al Qaeda leadership for running Islamic courts to try locals for working with the Iraqi government and coalition forces and would sometimes abduct whole families. Those he found guilty were publicly executed. 
 
 Al-Baghdadi’s remarks are likely to complicate the arming of Syrian rebels by Gulf powers. Since January, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have increased significantly weapon supplies to brigades affiliated with the Free Syrian Army in the hope that the weapons would shift the balance of the war decisively and quickly in favor of the rebels. But videos posted by al-Nusra last month show their fighters using Croatian anti-tank weapons the Gulf powers are thought to have earmarked for the FSA. 
 
 The British and French governments have been pushing to increase the flow of weapons to the Syrian rebels and for a European Union arms embargo to be lifted, but other European nations have resisted, arguing the equipment would fall into the hands of jihadist groups such as al-Nusra. European critics of the Anglo-French position say the intended recipients of the weapons, the FSA rebel units, work too closely with al-Nusra to keep the weapons to themselves, say German diplomats involved in EU negotiations. 
 
 “We are concerned that the FSA isn’t really a cohesive force with a single command-and-control structure,” says a German diplomat based in Brussels. “The FSA can’t stop weaponry from being shared with al-Nusra and other jihadists,” he says. 
 
 According to al-Baghdadi al-Nusra will now be officially merged with Al Qaeda in Iraq and the two groups will operate under the name Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham. The name change is significant and highlights Al Qaeda’s ambitions to use the Syrian conflict for greater regional goals. Al-Sham refers to Greater Syria, a pan-Arab geographical definition of a hypothetical united Arab state that corresponds to a medieval Arab province encompassing the eastern Mediterranean Sea, the Levant as well as Western Mesopotamia. 
 
 In recent weeks al-Nusra fighters have come closer to Lebanon and the likelihood has increased of a confrontation along the border between Lebanon’s Shiite armed movement Hezbollah and Sunni jihadists with al-Nusra, who have been moving into Shiite villages on the Syrian side of the border along a 30-mile stretch in the mountainous al-Nabk area about 50 miles north of Damascus, say Lebanese intelligence sources. 
 
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 In his audio message al-Baghdadi says the new merged group will not abide by geographical borders or be constrained by ethnic affiliations. That echoes what al-Nusra has said in recent months to other smaller Jihadist groups fighting in Syria. 
 
 In January al-Nusra issued a call to arms after a meeting in the Syrian province of Deir al-Zour with nine other jihadist groups. Al-Nusra urged all jihadist brigades to “unite in the cause of Allah, organize the efforts and the attacks against the soldiers of disbelief and apostasy, and distinguish the ranks of truth from falsehood.” The statement continued: “We call upon our sincere mujahedin brothers all over the strong Levant to unite their ranks in groups, pure of the filth of suspicious groups and the infiltration of people who have no qualities or faith, in order to clarify their banner and purify their path.” 
 
 As well as being at the forefront of major battles with Syrian government forces, al-Nusra has unleashed a bombing campaign. Its first suicide bombing came nine months after the uprising against Assad began with a two-car bomb attack on December 23, 2011—targeting the regime’s intelligence offices, killing at least 44 people, and wounding more than 160. According to the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, it is likely that two female suicide bombers from Iraq carried out that attack. Since then the pace of al-Nusra bombings has increased from one a month in the first three months of 2012 to four to six a month now. 
 
 The group has been careful in the past to limit its jihadi messages when interacting with locals in rebel-held territory and has talked more in terms of assisting the poor. It has basked in growing popularity in the rebel areas of Idlib and Aleppo provinces tucked under the border with Turkey. Civilians contrast the discipline and honesty of al-Nusra fighters with some FSA fighters and argue the jihadists share war spoils with civilians unlike FSA units. ||||| Militant Islamist rebels in Syria linked to al-Qaeda have asked for "understanding and forgiveness" for cutting off and putting on display the wrong man's head. 
 
 In a public appearance filmed and posted online, members of Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, one brandishing a knife, held up a bearded head before a crowd in Aleppo. They triumphantly described the execution of what they said was a member of an Iraqi Shia militia fighting for President Bashar al-Assad. 
 
 But the head was recognised from the video as originally belonging to a member of Ahrar al-Sham, a Sunni Islamist rebel group that often fights alongside ISIS though it does not share its al-Qaeda ideology. 
 
 After inquiries, an ISIS spokesman admitted he was Mohammed Fares, an Ahrar commander reported missing some days ago. This could not be independently confirmed, but in an earlier video of a speech by Mr Fares he bears a close resemblance to the severed head in the later video. 
 
 The Syrian Observatory of Human Rights, which monitors deaths in the Syrian conflict, and several activists on social media said that ISIS fighters misunderstood comments Mr Fares made referring to the Imams Ali and Hussein, the founding fathers of Shiism. 
 
 An ISIS spokesman, Omar al-Qahtani, confirmed that Mr Fares had been injured and, thinking he had been captured by members of a Shia militia against which he was fighting, asked them to kill him in terms misunderstood by the ISIS members in fact taking him to hospital. 
 
 It is thought he was wounded in the battle for Base 80, a military zone being fought over near Aleppo. 
 
 In explaining the error Mr al-Qahtani made reference to a story in which Mohammed said Allah would forgive a man who killed a believer in error. 
 
 The mistake, of a sort commonly cited as an argument against the death penalty around the world, is indicative of the chaos within rebel ranks, particularly since the rise of ISIS over the summer. Several other Islamist groups have formed alliances without its participation, but it continues to exercise control over large areas of northern Syria. 
 
 Its ferocity has given rise to an exodus of moderate and secular activists, and brought to an end an uneasy truce between the Free Syrian Army and Kurdish militias, the most prominent of which has in the last month taken on ISIS and driven them out of a number of towns in the north-east. 
 
 Meanwhile, Mr Assad's forces have used the internal rifts in their enemies' ranks to make progress on a drive south-east of Aleppo. This week, a group of Islamist rebels put out an appeal for a mass mobilisation against the advance, while there are repeated rumours that major Islamist militias which do not support al-Qaeda are about to declare a common front. 
 
 Mr Qahtani said the incident would be investigated by the appropriate judicial authorities.
– Syrian rebels are locked in a bitter and violent struggle—with each other. Hostilities between Syria's more moderate rebel factions and the al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamic State of Iraq and Syria exploded into open warfare on Friday, and it's been so costly that the head of another al-Qaeda affiliate, the al-Nusra Front, is calling for an Islamic court to be set up to settle disagreements, the New York Times reports. Abu Mohammed al-Jolani said the fighting was the result of the "incorrect policies" of the ISIS, but that if there wasn't a ceasefire soon, "the whole battlefield … will pay the price of losing a great jihad." Other rebels accuse the ISIS—which wants to combine Iraq and Syria into one Sunni-ruled country—of hogging resources, applying strict social codes, and kidnapping and killing its foes. So far at least 300 people have died in the rebel in-fighting since Friday, including dozens of civilians, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, and rebels today captured a hospital-turned-ISIS base in Aleppo, the AP reports. The infighting also highlights a challenge for Saudi Arabia, which is backing the rebels in hopes of ousting Assad's Shiite, Iran-affiliated regime, but is uneasy about the potential for jihadist spill-over, the Times adds.