(Beirut) At least 13 pro-regime fighters were killed on Saturday in an ambush by the Islamic State (IS) group in eastern Syria, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (OSDH) said.
Despite its rout in Syria in March 2019 with the fall of its “caliphate”, ISIS continues to launch deadly attacks in the country, especially in the vast Badiya desert which stretches from the central province of Homs to to that of Deir Ezzor, on the border with Iraq, where jihadists are also rife.
Carried out in the desert area of Masrib, in the west of the province of Deir Ezzor, the attack on Saturday killed “13 members of a local pre-regime group and injured others”, according to this NGO which has a vast network of sources in Syria.
The IS ambush was carried out while the pro-regime fighters were sweeping the area.
According to Rami Abdel Rahmane, director of the OSDH, this record is “the highest among regime forces and pre-regime groups in the past five months”.
Since March 2019, 1,593 members of the regime’s forces or groups loyal to it have been killed, as well as 153 non-Syrian pro-Iran fighters, in various bombing or ambush attacks carried out by IS, according to the OSDH.
In addition, 1,081 ISIS members were killed in attacks, according to the same source.
Earlier on Saturday, OSDH reported that three Iraqi refugees including a woman had been killed in the past two days by ISIS operatives in a camp in northeastern Syria.
Controlled by the semi-autonomous Kurdish administration, the Al-Hol camp, which hosts relatives of jihadist fighters, is home to nearly 62,000 displaced persons, the majority of whom are women and children.
The conflict in Syria, which started in 2011, caused the deaths of around half a million people and the displacement of more than half of the pre-war population.