Jihadists of the Islamic State edged closer to a strategic airbase in eastern Syria in heavy clashes that left 54 fighters dead, a monitoring group said today.
The extremist group, which has captured territory across Iraq and Syria, seized control late yesterday of an army post near the regime-held military airbase outside Deir Ezzor, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
“It was one of the Islamic State’s fiercest attacks on the airport,”Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman said, using an Arabic acronym for the jihadist group. He said 36 Islamic State fighters and 18 regime soldiers were killed.
The seizure of the army post, used by a rocket battalion, advanced IS to barely one kilometre from the airport. Abdel Rahman said the jihadists had used two suicide bombers in the assault, one of them a child, driving cars laden with explosives. More than 50 jihadists were wounded in the fighting, he added.
The IS already controls most of oil-rich Deir Ezzor province, including about half of its capital, and has fought for more than a year to capture the airport and the rest of the city. Deir Ezzor would be the second provincial capital to fall to the group after the northern city of Raqa, which it named the capital of its self-declared “caliphate”. The assault came as rival jihadists of Al-Qaida’s Syrian affiliate and their allies seized the last regime-held military base in Idlib province of northwest Syria.
The Observatory said the regime is now left with just three airbases in the east and north of the country — Deir Ezzor, and Neirab and Kweyris in Aleppo province.
Attacks in Saudi Arabia test security of Haj
DUBAI: The Islamic State is extending its reach in Saudi Arabia, expanding the scope of its attacks and drawing in new recruits with its radical ideology.
Its determination to bring down the US-allied royal family has raised concerns it could threaten the annual Muslim Haj pilgrimage later this month. So far, the extremist group's presence in the kingdom appears to be in a low-level stage, but it has claimed four significant bombings since May, one of them in neighbouring Kuwait. And it has rapidly ramped up its rhetoric, aiming to undermine the Al Saud royal family's legitimacy, which is rooted in part in its claim to implement Islamic sharia law and to be the protectors of Islam's most sacred sites in Mecca and Medina that are at the centre of Haj.
An attack last month in which IS claimed responsibility appeared to mark a significant spread in the group's reach.
