The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights counted yesterday that ten civilians and one member of regime forces were killed in an attack launched by ISIS in central Syria. regime forces” were killed, and the rest are still missing.
This was reported by the official Syrian news agency SANA. It said members of the organization had attacked residents with “machine guns”, noting that four civilians, including a woman, had been killed.
According to the SANA, ten more people were injured, “some of them seriously.”
Since announcing the liquidation of its caliphate in 2019 and the loss of all areas of its control, the extremist organization has retreated into the Syrian desert, which stretches between the governorates of Homs (central) and Deir ez-Zor (eastern), on the border with Iraq, where its fighters entrenched in mountainous areas. According to the Observatory, the organization is taking advantage of the departure of people from remote rural areas in central Syria to collect truffles in preparation for selling them to attack them.
In April 2021, the organization abducted 19 people, most of them civilians, in a similar attack it carried out in the countryside of east Hama in the center of the country.
During the truffle season, civilians often face another danger, which is the mines laid by the organization in the vast desert areas that were under the control of the organization before it was expelled from it.
From time to time, the organization’s fighters carry out attacks in the desert, especially targeting Kurdish fighters and Syrian regime forces. Syrian and Russian helicopters are attacking the movement and positions of the organization in the desert. Since it began in 2011, the conflict in Syria has claimed the lives of nearly half a million people, caused massive damage to infrastructure and the economy, and forced more than half of the population to flee inside or outside of Syria.
