At least 37 people in Syria have been killed in one of the biggest attacks by Islamic State since the fall of the self-proclaimed caliphate last year.
The attack on Wednesday targeted a convoy of Syrian regime soldiers and militiamen who returned on leave to their posts in the province of Deir ez-Zor, an area mostly deserted on the border with Iraq.
The official state news agency, Sana, reported that a terrorist attack on a bus on the main highway killed 25 civilians and wounded 13. Other sources, including local residents, a military defector and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) based in the United Kingdom), increased the toll and claimed that soldiers were on board. A source told Reuters the men were from the elite of the Fourth Brigade of Bashar al-Assad.
According to SOHR, the bus was ambushed in a well-planned operation near the village of Shula by jihadists who set up a checkpoint to stop the convoy and detonated bombs before opening fire. Two more buses managed to escape.
“It was one of the deadliest attacks since the fall of the Isis (self-proclaimed) caliphate” last year, the head of the Observatory, Rami Abdel Rahman, told AFP.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the incident.
Founded amid the chaos of Syria’s civil war, Isis declared its caliphate in 2014 and at one point controlled an area of Syria and Iraq as large as the United Kingdom and where about 8 million people live.
The group lost control of the last splinters of its territory in the Deir Ez-Zor desert in March 2019, after five years of offensives conducted mainly by the U.S. and its regional allies to expel militants from both countries.
Jihadist dormant cells continued to launch ambushes and attack and escape attacks from caves and bases in the vast Syrian desert, and Isis militants and Assad’s troops frequently clash in the area.
There has been a sharp increase in violence in recent months, residents say. In April, 27 fighters loyal to the Damascus government and allied Iranian militias were killed in an Isis attack near the desert city of al-Sukhna.
Local tribes also expressed anger at the executions carried out by Iranian militias allied with the regime of dozens of nomads suspected of affiliation with the militants.
In the past few days, in the north of the country, rebels supported by Turkey have clashed with Kurdish forces near Ain Issa, a city on a strategic highway that has been patrolled by Russian and Turkish troops since US forces withdrew from the country. area in 2019.
Turkish forces and their Syrian insurgent allies took advantage of the US reduction to take territory previously controlled by the Kurdish-led SDF militia, which fought alongside the US against Isis.
Ain Issa, east of the Euphrates River, also has a large camp for displaced people, where SDF maintains families of Isis fighters, including foreigners.
The violence prompted Russia to send reinforcements from the military police to the area.
A decade of civil war in Syria has attracted foreign powers, killed some 500,000 people and expelled more than half of the pre-war population from their homes.