“Islamic State members launched a violent attack on the positions of regime forces and the National Defense Forces in the Rusafa desert at the Raqqa-Homs-Deir ez-Zor triangle … 34 members of the regime and national defense forces were killed in the attack,” the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
The monitor added that Russian warplanes launched airstrikes on ISIS positions in the desert, killing over 30 jihadists.
ISIS rose to power and seized swathes of Syrian and Iraqi land in a brazen offensive in 2014, declaring a so-called “caliphate.”
While the group was declared territorially defeated in Iraq and Syria in 2017 and 2019 respectively, it still continues to pose serious security risks through hit-and-run attacks, bombings, and abductions, especially across the vast expanses of the Syrian desert as well as several Iraqi provinces.
The militant group has been blamed for a string of attacks against Syrian regime forces throughout the year.
In August, an ISIS attack on Syrian army soldiers in the eastern Deir ez-Zor province killed 33, days after ten Syrian soldiers were killed in another ISIS attack in their former stronghold of Raqqa.
A civil war broke out in Syria in 2011 after the government’s brutal crackdown on protests, and the security situation has remained fragile ever since.
The conflict then erupted into multiple fronts with the emergence of ISIS, constant fighting between Kurdish forces and Turkey and Turkish-backed proxies, Israeli strikes on pro-Iran factions and tit-for-tat attacks between the US and Iran. Russia has also backed the Syrian government, while about a thousand US troops are stationed in Syria to train and assist in the fight against ISIS.
