Daesh attack kills at least 75 in Syria’s Deir ez-zor
A car bombing by the Daesh terrorist group killed at least 75 displaced people in eastern Syria, a monitor said on Sunday, as the cornered terrorists appeared to target fleeing civilians.
Saturday’s attack in the eastern province of Deir ez-zor killed “at least 75 displaced civilians including children” and wounded 140, said Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, AFP reported.
Abdel Rahman said “a new convoy of displaced people joined the gathering at the time of the attack.”
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Qassemi condemned the terrorist attack, saying that “such inhumane and brutal acts by the Daesh terrorist group are clear signs of the group’s frustration and defeat,”
He also offered his condolences to the Syrian people and government over the attack.
The displaced in Deir ez-zor had fled battles in the province, where Syrian forces and the Us-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) are fighting the terrorist group in separate offensives.
The Britain-based war monitor, which relies on a network of sources on the ground inside Syria for its information, reported Saturday that dozens had died in the bombing.
Fighting across Deir ez-zor Province has sent thousands of civilians fleeing for their lives, some straight into the desert.
Syrian and allied forces converged Saturday on holdout Daesh terrorists in the border town of Albu Kamal, the terrorists’ very last urban bastion after Syrian forces seized Deir ez-zor city on Friday.
The terrorists, who in 2014 declared a “caliphate” spanning territory in Iraq and Syria roughly the size of Britain, have also lost most of the territory they once controlled in neighboring Iraq, including the second city of Mosul.
On Friday, Iraqi forces retook the border town of Al-qaim, also on the Euphrates River.
Many of the remaining Daesh terrorists are believed to have fled across the border to Albu Kamal, also in Deir ez-zor Province.
Aid group Save the Children estimates that some 350,000 people have fled the recent fighting in the oil-rich province, half of them children.
Some of those displaced had sought refuge in a desert area controlled by the SDF, a Kurdish-arab alliance, on the eastern bank of the Euphrates River where the Saturday bombing struck, the Observatory said.
It was not the first attack attributed to Daesh against civilians fleeing Deir ez-zor.
On October 12, a car bombing in the northeastern province of Hasakeh killed at least 18 people, including displaced people and Kurdish security forces, the Observatory said.
The United Nations on Thursday said the Daesh terrorist group had executed 741 civilians in the battle for the Iraqi city of Mosul, accusing it of “indiscriminate targeting of civilians trying to flee the city.”
The purge against the kingdom’s political and business elite also targeted the head of the National Guard, Prince Miteb bin Abdullah, who was detained and replaced as minister of the powerful National Guard by Prince Khaled bin Ayyaf.
News of the purge came early on Sunday after King Salman decreed the creation of an anticorruption committee chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, his 32-year-old favorite son, who has amassed power since rising from obscurity three years ago.
The new body was given broad powers to investigate cases, issue arrest warrants and travel restrictions, and seize assets.