Fighting in East Syria leaves over 200 people dead

BEIRUT: US-backed fighters in Syria suffered record fatalities in an assault by the Islamic State group, a war monitor said yesterday, as holdout jihadists kept up a fierce defense of their last Syrian redoubt. It said a total of more than 200 people have been killed since around 500 IS fighters burst out of the fog shrouding the area in eastern Syria near the border with Iraq to launch their deadly assault on Friday. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 92 of the dead were fighters from the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the Kurdish-led ground units that have spearheaded the USbacked fight against IS in Syria.

Mounting toll

At least 61 jihadists and 51 civilians, mostly their relatives, also died in the violence which saw US-led coalition air strikes help the SDF recover positions it had briefly lost. The jihadists used suicide bombers, suicide commandos and sleeper cells in the countryside around their bastion of Hajin to inflict maximum damage, it said. “It’s the largest number of SDF fighters killed (by IS) in a single battle since it was founded” in 2015, Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman said. The SDF, an alliance of fighters from the main Syrian Kurdish militia known as the People’s Protection Units and anti-jihadist Arab fighters, rarely releases full casualty figures.

Abdel Rahman said the latest deaths brought to 452 the number of SDF fighters killed since the start of their offensive on the Hajin pocket on September 10. The jihadists have been putting up fierce resistance from their remote Euphrates strongholds, the last rump but also the hard core of a once sprawling “caliphate” that straddled Iraq and Syria. Most of their recent forays and their deadliest attacks have come as a result of weather conditions hampering the coalition’s ability to launch air strikes. Abdel Rahman said local tribal fighters opposed to IS also helped the SDF take back the positions they had lost on Friday. The Observatory, which relies on a vast network of local sources, said the death toll continued to soar on Sunday as many bodies were discovered.

The IS propaganda agency Amaq had released a statement Saturday claiming to have killed 60 enemy fighters and captured 30. According to the Observatory, a total of 284 civilians have been killed since the start of the attacks on the IS pocket two and half months ago. Most of them have died in air strikes, the Britain-based group says. The coalition usually only admits to a fraction of the civilian deaths it is believed to have caused. The SDF is fighting to retake areas which have no Kurdish presence even as Turkish forces attack its own heartland further north.