At least 37 people in Syria have been killed in one of the largest attacks carried out by the Islamic State since the fall of the self-proclaimed caliphate last year.
The assault on Wednesday allegedly targeted a convoy of Syrian regimental soldiers and military returning from duty to their posts in Deir ez-Zor province, a predominantly desert area on the border with Iraq.
The official news agency Sana, reports that a terrorist attack on a bus on the highway killed 25 civilians and wounded 13. Other sources, including locals, a military defector and the British monitor Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), raised the toll, claiming soldiers were on board. One source told Reuters that the men came from Bashar al-Assad’s elite fourth brigade.
According to SOHR, in a well-planned operation near the town of Shula, the bus was led into a trap by jihadists who set up a checkpoint to stop the convoy and detonate bombs before setting it on 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, observation chief Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the incident.
Isis, founded amid the chaos of Syria’s civil war, declared its so-called caliphate in 2014 and at one point controlled an area of Syria and Iraq as large as the United Kingdom and home to about 8 million people.
The group lost control of the last stretches of its territory in the Deir Ez-Zor desert in March 2019, after five years of insurgency carried out mostly by the US and its regional allies to expel the militants from both countries.
Jihadist sleeping cells have continued to launch ambushes and hit-and-run attacks from caves and bases in Syria’s vast desert, and Isis militants and Assad’s troops often clash in the area.
The residents have had a clear increase in violence over the past few months. In April, 27 fighters loyal to the government of Damascus and related Iranian military were killed in an Isis attack near the desert town of Al-Sukhna.
Local tribes also expressed outrage over executions carried out by Iranian militias of dozens of nomads associated with the regime, suspected of pledging to the militants.
In the north of the country, the rebel fighters backed by Turkey have clashed with Kurdish forces near Ain Issa in recent days, a city on a strategic highway patrolled by Russian and Turkish troops since US troops left in 2019. withdrew the area.
Turkish forces and their Syrian rebel allies have taken advantage of the US withdrawal to seize territory previously controlled by the Kurdish-led SDF militia, which has been fighting with the US against Isis.
Ain Issa, east of the Euphrates River, also has an extensive camp for displaced people, where the SDF detained families of Isis fighters, including foreigners.
The violence led to Russia sending military police reinforcements to the area.
A decade of civil war in Syria has drawn foreign powers, killing an estimated 500,000 people and expelling more than half of the pre-war population from their homes.