Islamic State Prepares For Major Attack On Southern Syria – Approaches Israel
Lebanese media reported this morning that Islamic State is preparing for a major assault on Syria’s Suweida province that lies 160 miles southwest of Palmyra, the ancient city ISIS seized last week.
Suweida is home to the Druze minority in Syria and lies east of the Golan Heights and Israel. Druze residents have started to mobilize forces to defend their region against Islamic State. Last week, Islamic State briefly seized the Druze village of Al-Huqf in a surprise raid. Five soldiers of the Syrian army were killed in the raid.
Map of Syria showing As-Suweida province, Golan Heights and Palmyra (Tadmur)
The reason for the assault on al-Huqf was that Islamic State wanted to discover what military capabilities the Druze had at their disposal following the regime’s inability to defend areas in eastern and southern Syria. The Druze in southern Syria have for a long time tried to stay out of the civil war and maintained an autonomous attitude despite efforts by the regime and Islamist rebels to enlist them to fight in other parts of Syria.
Syrian news agency ARA News reportedtoday that ISIS reinforcements have arrived via the desert road from Palmyra to eastern Suweida. “There are large gatherings of ISIS fighters with weapons and military vehicles including 13 tanks and 10 humvees that were seized in Iraq,” ARA reported.
The London-based daily Asharq Alawsat reported on Sunday that Islamic State forces had taken up positions along the eastern border of Suweida province in a swathe of territory stretching roughly 90 miles. A Druze source reported to Asharq Alawsat that Islamic State is currently deployed in small groups in villages southwest of the Jordanian border.
Following ISIS’ victory in Palmyra in the middle of the Syrian Desert on May 20, eyes have turned to where the group would strike next.
The capture of Palmyra last week has opened the road for ISIS to mobilize its fighters and quickly move across barren stretches of desert in a number of directions, including toward Suweida.
A source from Free Syrian Army-affiliated Southern Front coalition told Asharq Alawsat that “the group might have taken the decision to expand across Suweida as part of its strategy to pounce on Daraa, and then Quneitra.”
He explained that ISIS could prefer to expand through Suweida because the battles that would take place in the area would not be costly for them.
Quneitra lies on the border with Israel on the Syrian Golan Heights.
The advances by Islamic State in southern Syria are an existential threat to the Druze population. Druze are not Muslims and have a long history of repression at the hands of Muslims.
In late March, Syria’s Druze clerical leadership called on the regime to provide their community with arms.
“We will pursue a request to secure weaponry and appropriate logistical support immediately from the concerned bodies in the Syrian government,” the clerics said in a statement obtained March 27 by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The statement warned that Syria’s Druze were facing a grave and existential threat and called on “all our young men in the Suweida governorate to shoulder their responsibilities to protect their areas.”
Elsewhere in Syria in the northeastern province of Hasakeh Kurdish, forces succeeded in driving Islamic State out of 14 Christian villages that had been controlled by ISIS since February this year. The villages lie in Syrian Kurdistan and were home to one of the world’s oldest Christian communities, the Assyrians.
Thousands of Christians fled from Hasakeh during the Islamic State assault in February. Those who remained were taken hostage or killed when they refused to convert to Islam. ISIS still holds 210 Assyrians hostage.
In Palmyra, Islamic State executed twenty people in the ancient amphitheater, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported today. Supporters of ISIS confirmed the executions on Twitter.
Iraq
In Iraq, government forces supported by Shiite militias recaptured two towns in the vicinity of Ramadi, the city that was seized by Islamic State at the beginning of last week.
An Iraqi official in the Anbar police command told the German news agency DPA that security forces backed by Shiite militias and local tribes had regained control of Tash and Hamira south of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, cutting off Islamic State supply lines in the area.
Meanwhile, a pro-government Shiite militia, known as the Popular Mobilization, announced it had advanced into the area of Nabai in the vicinity of Ramadi, forcing Islamic State fighters to retreat.
“Daesh elements escaped once the Public Mobilization fighters entered into Nabai,” Hassan al-Sari, a field commander in the Shiite militia, told Iraqi site Alsumaria News, using the Arabic acronym for Islamic State.
Elsewhere in the Anbar province, Islamic State unleashed a wave of suicide attacks killing at least 17 Iraqi soldiers. The attacks came just hours after the Iraqi government on Tuesday announced the start of a wide-scale operation to recapture areas under the control of the ISIS group in Anbar.
This post originally appeared on Western Journalism - Equipping You With The Truth
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