Agencies
Ramallah :A string of suicide blasts and raids claimed by the Islamic State group killed more than 220 people in southern Syria, in one of the jihadists’ deadliest ever assaults in the country.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the attacks hit several areas of the largely government-held southern province of Sweida, where IS retains a presence in a northeastern desert region.
The bloodshed came almost a week into a Russia-backed regime campaign to oust IS fighters from a holdout in a neighbouring province of the country’s south.
IS claimed responsibility for the violence, saying “soldiers of the caliphate” attacked Syrian government positions and security outposts in Sweida city, then detonated explosive belts.
The Britain-based Observatory said four suicide bombers targeted Sweida city while others hit small villages to the north and east and shot residents in their homes.
At least 221 people were killed, including 127 civilians, the Observatory said.
The remaining 94 dead were pro-regime fighters, mostly residents who took up arms to defend their homes, it said.
The overwhelming majority of the dead “were in (Sweida’s) northern countryside, where the bodies of civilians executed inside their homes were found,” Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.
Sweida, whose residents are mostly from the Druze minority, has been relatively insulated from the war that has ravaged the rest of the country since 2011.
“It’s the bloodiest death toll in Sweida province since the start of the war” and one of the deadliest ever IS attacks in Syria, the Observatory chief said.
He said regime forces eventually ousted IS from several villages its fighters had seized and put an end to the attacks.
“Some residents who fled the attacks on their villages are returning and finding people dead in their homes,” Abdel Rahman said.
At least 38 IS fighters were also killed, including the suicide attackers.
State media confirmed the attacks had killed and wounded people in Sweida city and villages to the north and east but did not give a specific toll.
“Today’s crime shows that countries supporting terrorism are trying to breathe life back into the terrorist organisation to keep it as a card in their hand that they will use to achieve political gains,” Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as he received Russia’s envoy to Syria Alexander Lavrentiev.
“These attempts will only succeed in… shedding more innocent blood,” he added, in comments carried on his social media accounts.
Omar, a resident of Sweida city, told AFP explosions began rocking the city around 5:30 am local time (0230 GMT).
“The blast was sudden and unexpected. Never in its history has Sweida seen such a tough day,” he told AFP.
State news agency SANA published images from the city of the attack’s aftermath, showing a victim’s remains sprawled on a staircase near a damaged wall.
Abandoned shoes lay in the middle of the road among fruit that had spilt out of cartons.
An eyewitness said Sweida’s national hospital was “packed”.
He said he saw “people bringing in a lot of wounded in their own private cars.. Others were coming to the hospital to ask if loved ones they had lost track of were there”.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by The Kashmir Monitor staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
