Islamic State Attack Kills 9 Syrian Soldiers, War Monitor Reports
Fighters with the Islamic State stormed a Syrian military barracks on Monday, killing nine soldiers and wounding three more, according to a Britain-based war monitoring organization.
IS claimed the attack near the town of As Sukhnah in central Syria on Tuesday, and it says that its forces stole weapons and equipment from the facility before setting it on fire, alleging that the Syrian soldiers fled the scene during the attack.
The Syrian government has yet to confirm the attack.
Operating out of the region’s arid desert, IS has managed to avoid complete destruction. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the war monitoring group that reported Monday’s attack, says that there have already been 41 IS attacks this year alone.
A self-proclaimed transnational caliphate, IS rose to power in the region during the mid-2010s amid the chaos and violence of the sectarian conflicts in Iraq and Syria, declaring an unrecognized quasi-state that, at its peak, included a vast swath of territory from central Syria into eastern Iraq.
Foreign military intervention led by an international coalition that included the United States, Iran, and Russia led to the group’s nominal defeat in 2019.
Bashar Assad’s Syrian government and allied Iran-backed Shia militias have battled IS remnants in the area over the last five years. Since Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, these factions have also launched attacks against the US-led forces sent to quell the IS insurgency.
Allied with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces based in northeastern Syria, the United States has approximately 900 soldiers stationed in Syria and frequently cooperates on joint military operations with its Kurdish partners.
