Daesh kills 12 US-backed fighters in Syria

At least 12 of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Front (SDF) fighters were killed yesterday in an attack by Daesh from one of its holdouts in eastern Syria on the Iraqi border, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) reported yesterday.

The SDF fighters were killed in a car bombing and subsequent clashes in the country’s eastern province of Deir Al-Zor.

According to the SOHR’s chief, Rami Abdel-Rahman, Sunday’s attack “started with a car bomb driven by a suicide attacker against an SDF position between Hajin and Al-Bahra.”

The attack, Abdel-Rahman explained, allowed Daesh to advance towards Al-Bahra village from its holdout around the city of Hajin, adding that they had pushed back the first lines of SDF’s defence backed by the US-led coalition. He noted that the alliance suffered a major setback as they retreated last week from the entire pocket due to heavy sand storms resulting in low visibility.

Read: UN aid trucks reach remote Rukban camp in Syria

On Wednesday, SDF announced a “temporary” suspension of its offensive against Daesh in eastern Syria, after Turkish forces had fired on the group’s positions in northern Syria.

“There are counter-attacks every day, and the clashes are ongoing, but the talk of martyrs among our ranks is not true,” SOHR spokesperson, Mustafa Bali, told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Since the launch of the attack on the Daesh-held pockets in eastern Syria two months ago, 523 militants were killed, while 327 SDF fighters were killed in the clashes between the two rivals, according to the SOHR data.

The US coalition says around 2,000 Daesh militants remain in the Hajin pocket near the border with Iraq.

Daesh overran large territories of Syria and neighbouring Iraq in 2014, proclaiming a “caliphate” across the land it controlled, but it has since lost most of that territory to various offensives in both countries. In Syria, its presence has been reduced to parts of the vast Badia desert and Hajin.

A total of more than 360,000 people have been killed since Syria’s multi-front war erupted in 2011 with the brutal repression of anti-government protests.

Read: Daesh militant buries himself alive escaping Iraqi security