At least 102 killed in IS attacks in Syria

BEIRUT IN A STATEMENT ON THE TELEGRAM MESSAGING APP, ISLAMIC STATE SAID “SOLDIERS OF THE CALIPHATE” ATTACKED SECURITY POSITIONS AND GOVERNMENT TARGETS IN SWEIDA CITY

: A string of attacks by the Islamic State group in Syria’s southern province of Sweida on Wednesday killed 102 people, including 35 civilians, a monitor said.

The attacks which included suicide blasts also killed 67 regime fighters, most of whom were residents who had picked up weapons to defend their villages, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group.

The attacks included a motorcycle bomber who struck at a busy vegetable market, killing 38 people. The coordinated attacks — the worst in recent months— were reminiscent of Islamic State’s horrific assaults that spread mayhem over the past years in Syria, already ravaged by civil war. The bombings in the city of Sweiba, a provincial capital populated by Syria’s minority Druze, were apparently timed to coincide with attacks by a militant group linked to IS on a number of villages in the province, also called Sweida.

Al-Ikhbariya state-run TV showed images from several locations in the province and its capital where the bombers blew themselves up. The breakdown of the fatalities from the attacks was not immediately known.

The rare attacks in Sweida came amid a government offensive elsewhere in the country’s south. Government forces are battling the IS-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.

IS has been largely defeated in Syria and Iraq, but still has pockets of territory it controls in the east and south.eastern Syria and in the country’s south.