An organization tracking violence in Syria reported on Monday that Islamic State (ISIS) jihadists killed four of dictator Bashar Assad’s soldiers in an attack intentionally targeting the military, the latest in what experts fear is an accelerating escalation of ISIS activity in the country.
The incident reportedly occurred in the province of Raqqa, whose eponymous largest city was once the capital of the Islamic State “caliphate” established over significant portions of both Iraq and Syria. It occurred in the context of growing concern that, after the eradication of ISIS from Raqqa in 2017, the Sunni jihadist terror group has found a way to regroup in the Middle East, in addition to increasing its activity throughout Africa and South Asia.
A Syrian man walks past a giant portrait of President Bashar al-Assad at the Umawiyin square in Syria’s capital Damascus on May 3, 2021. (LOUAI BESHARA/AFP via Getty Images)
Much of the contemporary focus on the Islamic State is placed on ISIS-Khorasan Province, its local cell in Afghanistan. ISIS-K reportedly claimed responsibility for a massive terrorist attack on the Crocus City music venue and mall outside of Moscow, Russia, in March, and has shown signs of expanding under the rule of the Taliban terrorist organization. The Islamic State has also expanded its influence throughout Africa, particularly in nations with weak governments such as Nigeria and Mozambique. In the past year, however, monitors have documented growing ISIS activity in the territory that was once its “caliphate.”
The reported killing of Assad troops this weekend was reported by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an group that has long documented violence in the country, particularly throughout the decade-long Syrian Civil War.
“Four members of the regime forces were killed following an attack targeting military positions … south of the city of Tabqa in the western countryside of Raqqa,” the Kurdish news outlet Rudaw quoted the Observatory as stating. The report added that the official Syrian military received “reinforcements” following the attack from an independent pro-Assad militia known as the “National Defense Forces” (NDF).
“ISIS attacks have been on the rise in Syria, particularly in the vast expanses of its eastern and northern deserts where the group launches surprise attacks amid a security vacuum,” Rudaw observed.
The U.S. outlet Voice of America cited multiple reports in early April that had similarly found evidence of the Islamic State regrouping in both Syria and Iraq, adding more recruits to its numbers and expanding the areas where they operate. Some of that evidence came from statistics documented by U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), the wing of the Pentagon that operates in the Middle East.
“Just-released data from U.S. Central Command, which oversees U.S. forces across the Middle East and South Asia, puts the number of Islamic State fighters in Syria and Iraq at about 2,500 — more than double estimates from late January,” Voice of America reported.
Voice of America also cited a report by the Counter Extremism Project, a nonprofit that moinitors global terrorist activity, that concluded “March was, by every metric, the most violent month of ISIS’s Badia [central Syrian desert] insurgency since late 2017, when the group first lost control of its territory.”
The report specifically noted that Islamic State terrorists were increasingly targeting “security forces,” including Assad’s. At the peak of the “caliphate,” much of ISIS’s violence was directed at non-Assad targets, such as the U.S. military and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a coalition of militias led by the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG/YPJ). The SDF, in concert with American forces, were ultimately responsible for the liberation of Raqqa.
“ISIS carried out at least 69 confirmed attacks in March in the Aleppo, Homs, Hama, Raqqa, and Deir Ez Zor governorates,” the Counter Extremism Project report documented. “These attacks killed at least 84 pro-Assad regime soldiers and 44 civilians and wounded at least 51 more soldiers and civilians.”
As a result of its protagonist role in the fall of ISIS, the SDF to this day controls several prisons holding Islamic State terrorists, many of them foreign nations whose countries refuse to repatriate them. Iraq has stepped up to take some of those suspected terrorists back – concluding the repatriation of nearly 700 suspected Islamic State members, mostly women and children, on Monday – but its efforts are not enough alone to significantly reduce the population of SDF prisons.
In yet another sign of the growing strength of ISIS in the region, SDF leaders reported an attack on one of those prisons on April 16.
“Following the attack, dozens of ISIS detainees attempted to escape from the prison. However, the security measures implemented by our SDF forces and internal security have foiled the attempted escape,” the SDF said at the time, according to the Kurdish outlet Kurdistan 24.
Kurdistan 24 noted that the SDF has been warning for months that ISIS activity in the regions where it operates has “increased significantly” in the past year and that reports by independent entities appeared to corroborate the claim. In January, for example, a United Nations report claimed that ISIS had transformed the heart of central Syria into “a logistics and operations hub with 500 to 600 fighters.”
The U.S. State Department has repeatedly acknowledged the persistence of the Islamic State in Syria.
“We continue to see a real threat in Iraq and Syria, where ISIS at one point controlled a region with a population of approximately ten million people,” Deputy Special Envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS Ian McCary said during remarks marking the anniversary of the fall of the “caliphate” in March, “and we have seen the emergence of ISIS affiliates – the so-called ISIS Khorasan inside Afghanistan, which poses a clear external threat – and in Sub-Saharan Africa where several ISIS affiliates have emerged.”
“We are clear-eyed about the continuing threat ISIS still poses and we remain highly engaged in this endeavor,” McCary said of the global coalition, led by the United States.
The State Department’s annual report on human rights for 2023 for Syria, published on April 22, repeatedly identified the Islamic State as a persistent threat to human rights.
“ISIS carried out killings, attacks, and kidnappings, including against civilians. There were no reports of investigation into or prosecution for such actions,” the report observed. “NGOs reported extensively on reports of regime and proregime forces, as well as HTS and ISIS, sexually assaulting, torturing, detaining, killing, and otherwise abusing children.”
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