Attacks shatter calm in southern Syria
More than 200 dead as Daesh sets off blasts in Sweida province
DAMASCUS, SYRIA— Daesh fighters ambushed a city and several villages in southern Syria on Wednesday, triggering ferocious clashes between residents and the militants that provincial health officials said killed more than 200 people.
The co-ordinated attacks across the province of Sweida, which included several suicide bombings, shattered the calm of a region that has been largely insulated from the worst of the violence of Syria’s seven year long civil war.
The suicide bomb blasts inside the provincial capital, also called Sweida, were apparently timed to coincide with attacks on villages in the eastern countryside, creating mayhem across the province.
The attacks triggered deadly clashes between pro-government fighters and residents who picked up weapons to defend their hometowns on one side and Daesh militants on the other.
By nightfall, the province’s health directorate had recorded 204 civilians killed and 180 wounded, according to local official Hassan Omar, making it the single bloodiest day for the province since the 2011 national revolt that sparked the ongoing civil war.
Sultan Bou Ammar, a resident of the village of Shbiki, said some residents unwittingly opened their doors when militants knocked early Thursday morning, so unexpected was the attack.
“They kidnapped more than 40 people, all of them women or children,” said Bou Ammar.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said at least 183 people were killed, including 94 residents who were part of local defence militias that have the backing of the Syrian government. At least 45 Daesh militants were killed in the fighting.
Al-Ikhbariya state-run TV showed images from several locations in the province and its capital where the bombers blew themselves up.
The rare attacks in Sweida, populated mainly by Syria’s minority Druze, came amid a gov- ernment offensive elsewhere in the country’s south. Government forces are battling the Daesh-linked group near the frontier with Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and near the border with Jordan. The group also has a small presence on the eastern edge of Sweida province.
Since their offensive in June, Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces have retaken ter- ritories controlled by the rebels along the Golan Heights frontier and are now fighting militants in the country’s southern tip.
Daesh has been largely defeated in Syria and Iraq, but still has pockets of territory it controls in eastern and southern Syria.
The extremist group, also known as ISIS, boasted that its “soldiers” killed more than 100 people in Sweida.