Islamic State militants pass a checkpoint bearing the group’s trademark black flag in the village of Maryam Begg in Kirkuk, 290km north of Baghdad, Iraq. File
| Photo Credit: AP
Islamic State fighters have killed nearly 4,100 people in Syria since 2019 when the jihadists lost their last stronghold in the country, a war monitor said on June 29.
IS overran large swathes of Syria and Iraq in 2014, proclaiming a so-called caliphate and launching a reign of terror in June of that year.
In March 2019, the jihadist group lost its last scraps of Syrian territory in a Kurdish-led military campaign backed by a US-led coalition, but remnants continue to launch deadly attacks from desert hideouts.
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IS fighters “have killed about 4,100 people in more than 2,550 operations in areas controlled by the regime or” the semi-autonomous Kurdish administration since 2019, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said in a report.
Most of the victims are soldiers, government loyalists and Kurdish-led fighters, but the toll also incudes 627 civilians, the Britain-based Observatory said.
More than half of the 4,085 victims fell in Syria’s vast Badia desert, which runs from the outskirts of Damascus to the Iraqi border.
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A total of “2,744 people have been killed by the IS group since its formal collapse in 2019, in various areas of the Syrian desert,” said the monitor, which relies on a network of sources inside the country.
IS fighters have killed more than 2,500 government loyalists and soldiers in the Badia since their so-called caliphate fell, according to the Observatory.
“Hardly a day goes by without bombings, ambushes, targeted operations or surprise attacks” by the jihadists in the region, the report said.
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“These operations are met with periodic security campaigns carried out by regime forces and groups loyal to them deep in the desert, with… Russian warplanes targeting the desert on a near-daily basis,” it added.
The group has sustained heavy damage, losing more than 2,000 fighters including top leaders since 2019, the report found.
A United Nations report released in January said IS’s combined strength in Iraq and Syria was between 3,000 and 5,000 fighters, with the Badia serving as a logistics and operations hub for the group in Syria.
Syria’s war has killed more than half a million people and displaced millions more since it broke out in March 2011 with Damascus’s brutal repression of anti-government protests.