The United States will declare the Al-Nusra Front, an insurgent group battling in Syria against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, a "foreign terrorist organization"

The United States will declare the Al-Nusra Front, an insurgent group battling in Syria against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, a "foreign terrorist organization," documents showed Tuesday.
  
The State Department has not formally announced the move to blacklist the group, but posted the declaration in the Federal Register, in a document that described the Al-Nusra Front as an alias of Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
  
The Al-Nusra Front has claimed responsibility for recent suicide bombings that killed scores of civilians as well as committing horrible massacres, and has said it hopes to replace the Assad family's rule with a “strict Islamic state”.

"We've had concerns that Al-Nusra is little more than a front for Al-Qaeda in Iraq, (which) has moved some of its operations into Syria," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said earlier on Monday.
  
She said the State Department would "have more to say about this" in the coming days.
  
Declaring the Al-Nusra Front a terrorist group would entail freezing its assets and banning Americans from any transactions with the group.
  
An AFP correspondent reporting from the scene said many of the fighters hailed from other Arab countries and Central Asia.
  
The move to declare the Al-Nusra Front a terror group comes ahead of the so-called Friends of Syria meeting set to take place in Morocco on Wednesday. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had planned to attend the meeting but canceled her trip on Monday due to “illness”. Deputy Secretary of State William Burns was to attend in her place.