BEIRUT: Daesh on Tuesday abducted 19 people, mostly civilians, in the centre of war-torn Syria, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
The extremists attacked regime forces in the Badia desert, before kidnapping eight policemen and 11 civilians from a small village.
Syria’s state news agency SANA said the extremists had taken “a number of inhabitants” from the village of Al-Saan in Hama province, after they went looking for truffles, fungi used in cooking.
Others were wounded and taken to hospital, it said.
Daesh fighters have ramped up their attacks in the past months against regime forces in the vast desert that stretches across central Syria to the eastern border with Iraq.
They have abducted civilians, shepherds and soldiers, Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said.
“Those abducted are usually killed, especially if they are members of the regime forces,” he said.
He added the kidnapping was the largest by the jihadists since they lost the last scrap of their cross-border proto-state in 2019.
Daesh overran large swathes of Syria and neighbouring Iraq in 2014.
They were expelled from their last patch of territory in eastern Syria in March 2019, but have retained a presence in the vast Badia desert.
In 2018, Daesh abducted around 30 people, mostly women and children, from the Syrian province of Sweida after it went on a deadly rampage butchering 250 people. Several of those abducted were killed.
Daesh abducts 19 in Syria, says human rights monitor
https://arab.news/rmecr
Daesh abducts 19 in Syria, says human rights monitor
- Daesh fighters have ramped up their attacks in the past months against regime forces
Assad forces injured 35 in 2016 chlorine attack: watchdog
- “There are reasonable grounds to believe that one Mi8/17 helicopter of the Syrian Arab Air Force dropped at least one yellow pressurised cylinder,” OPCW said
- The team interviewed dozens of witnesses, analyzed samples and reviewed satellite images
THE HAGUE: Former Syrian president Bashar Assad’s forces deployed chlorine gas in a 2016 attack that injured at least 35 people, the world’s chemical weapons watchdog concluded Thursday.
The October 2016 attack near a field hospital outside the town of Kafr Zeita, in western Syria, was already well-documented but the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) for the first time accused Assad’s forces.
“There are reasonable grounds to believe that one Mi8/17 helicopter of the Syrian Arab Air Force dropped at least one yellow pressurised cylinder,” the OPCW said in a report.
“Upon impact, the cylinder ruptured and released chlorine gas, which dispersed through the Wadi Al-Aanz valley, injuring 35 named individuals and affecting dozens more,” OPCW investigators concluded.
The team interviewed dozens of witnesses, analyzed samples and reviewed satellite images.
Assad was repeatedly accused of using chemical weapons during Syria’s 13-year civil war, and there has been widespread concern about the fate of Syria’s stocks since his 2024 ouster.
In a landmark speech last year, the foreign minister of the new Syrian government pledged to dismantle any remnants of Assad’s chemical weapons program.
The OPCW welcomed the “full and unfettered access” the new Syrian authorities granted their investigators.
It was the “first instance of cooperation by the Syrian Arab Republic with an... investigation,” the OPCW said.
The OPCW wants to establish a permanent presence in Syria to draw up an inventory of chemical weapons sites and start the destruction of the stockpiles.
