A senior member of the Free Syrian Army is reported to have been killed by a rival rebel group linked to al-Qaeda.
Kamal Hamami, of the group's Supreme Military Council, was meeting members of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant "to discuss battle plans".
A Free Syrian Army spokesman said he received a call from the group saying they had killed Kamal Hamami.
It is part of an escalating struggle within the armed uprising between moderates and Islamists.
The BBC's Paul Wood says a civil war within a civil war is building within the opposition as the two sides engage in a battle that is partly over the spoils and partly ideological.
Factional fightingKamal Hamami, also known as Abu Basir al-Ladkani, was in charge of a key brigade within the Free Syrian Army (FSA).
He is believed to have met members of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in the port city of Latakia to inform them of a planned offensive in the area, before being ambushed and shot dead.
A year ago the jihadis were still operating almost underground in Syria. Now they are powerful and important players, in some places running whole towns, where they impose Sharia law.
"This is a disaster for us, a disaster for the revolution," a female opposition activist told me. She was complaining about Islamist gunmen telling her not to smoke, to cover her head, and to leave meetings where she was the only woman.
She admitted that the jihadis had grown in popularity because of corruption and infighting among the FSA. Many rebel groups were preying on the people they are supposed to be fighting for, she conceded.
The moral clarity of the early days of the uprising has been lost. Then, people wanted to defend themselves against overwhelming and brutal force - and ultimately to replace a corrupt, one-party dictatorship. Now the revolution itself has become corrupt and, in rebel-held areas, people fear a different kind of tyranny: crime, kidnapping, gangsterism.
"The Islamic State phoned me saying that they killed Abu Basir and that they will kill all of the Supreme Military Council," FSA spokesman Qassem Saadeddine told Reuters news agency.
The FSA was formed in 2011 by army deserters based in Turkey and is said to have some 40,000 members.
Although they have had some successes in the fight against President Assad's forces, they say they will be unable to win the war unless they acquire more sophisticated weaponry.
In recent months, Western and Arab nations have agreed to step up support for moderate Syrian rebels in their battle against President Bashar al-Assad's forces.
But many in the West are nervous about heavy weaponry falling into the hands of radical groups.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq announced in April that it was merging with the Syrian Islamist group al-Nusra Front to form the single Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (the Levant).
The al-Nusra Front - which had gained a reputation for discipline and honesty - rejected the merger though not its allegiance to al-Qaeda.
The leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has urged its fighters to strive for an Islamic state in Syria.
The spread of Sharia in rebel-held areas has alarmed the moderate members of the opposition, who, though Muslim, do not want a religious state.
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