Islamic State fighters have kidnapped dozens of people in a surprise desert attack, their largest such operation for at least three years.
The group used motorbikes to storm a police station in the town of al-Saan, western Syria, on Tuesday, taking eight soldiers and police officers hostage, along with 11 civilians they believed to be informers for the Assad regime. As many as 46 others were captured but later released. At least one civilian was killed and several wounded.
The desert region was under Isis control until the Syrian army ousted the terrorists in September 2017. However, cells of Isis fighters have emerged in recent months to ambush buses carrying soldiers and have also carried out guerilla attacks across the border in Iraq.
Syria’s state news agency, Sana, said that one civilian had been “martyred” in the attack on the town of al-Sa’an, adding that terrorists also attacked and wounded a group of citizens while they were picking truffles.
Sleeper cells of Isis jihadists have emerged in recent months to ambush buses carrying soldiers in Syria and have carried out guerilla-style attacks in Iraq, but analysts said this represented the group’s most significant operation in western Syria for more than three years.
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Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based war monitor, said: “Since Daesh (Isis) has been finished in Syria, this is the largest number of kidnappings we have seen since the fall of the caliphate. Those abducted are usually killed, especially if they are members of the regime forces.”
He said, according to his sources, that Isis had taken at least 13 policemen and suspected “informers” for President Bashar al-Assad’s regime as hostages in the raid. He added that the terror group had killed 28 shepherds in the area since September and conducted occasional kidnappings against individuals and families.
Islamic State’s defeat on the battlefields of Syria and Iraq was considered complete in 2019, and its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, killed himself during a raid by US special operations forces in Syria that October.
However, as many as 10,000 of the militants are believed to have dispersed and gone into hiding. They have since emerged to wage a guerrilla campaign of terrorist attacks against local security forces and civilian targets, and have boasted of exploiting the distraction caused by the pandemic.
In 2018 they abducted 30 people, mostly women and children, from the Syrian province of Sweida after massacring 250 others. Several of those abducted were later killed.