ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and the United States-led coalition on Friday arrested a suspected leader of the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria’s eastern Deir ez-Zor province, a conflict monitor reported.
“In a special operation in the town of al-Busayrah in Deir ez-Zor countryside, the global coalition forces and the SDF arrested a leader of the Islamic State organization who leads a cell in the town to launch attacks and target SDF areas,” said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based war monitor.
Joint operations to pursue ISIS cells on the banks of the Euphrates River are ongoing, the monitor said, two days after the US-led coalition arrested three people in an airdrop operation in Hasaka province, with the support of the SDF.
ISIS attacks in Syria, particularly in the vast expanses of its eastern desert where the group is active amid a security vacuum, have been on the rise in recent months, sparking fears of a possible resurgence.
The commander of American operations in the Middle East, CENTCOM, General Michael Kurilla told Congress in March that if US troops were to leave, as they are under pressure to do in Iraq, “ISIS would reconstitute the ability to seize territory within two years,” according to the Pentagon’s most recent quarterly report on anti-ISIS operation.
ISIS rose to power and seized swathes of Iraqi and Syrian land in a brazen offensive in 2014, declaring a so-called “caliphate.” While the group was declared territorially defeated in 2019, it continues to pose serious security risks through hit-and-run attacks, bombings, and abductions in both Syria and Iraq.
The Kurdish-led and US-backed SDF, who control northeast Syria (Rojava), fought the lion’s share of the battle against ISIS and arrested thousands of the terror group’s fighters along with their wives and children when they crushed ISIS territorially and took the group’s last stronghold in Syria in 2019.
Hundreds of US troops stationed in Syria are part of an international coalition that has fought ISIS alongside the SDF.
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