10 OIL WORKERS KILLED IN ATTACK NEAR OIL FIELD IN SYRIA’S DEIR EZZOR

Protests against the Syrian Democratic Forces in Deir Ezzor, on 22 December 2022 (FILE PHOTO)

Fri 30 December 2022:

A day after Syrian Kurdish-led troops announced an offensive against ISIL, an attack in eastern Syria claimed the lives of 10 oil field workers, according to state news agency SANA.

The report on Friday stated that“Two others have been wounded in a terrorist attack that targeted three buses transporting workers from al-Taim oil field in Deir Az Zor” region.

SANA did not provide any information on the nature of the attack or who may be behind it, but a British-based war monitor accused “cells of the Islamic State group” of carrying out the assault near the oil field.

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“The attack began with explosive devices that went off as the buses drove by, and then the group’s militants shot at them,” Rami Abdel Rahman, director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told AFP.

On Thursday the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) said they had begun an offensive against Islamic State fighters, following an earlier assault on a prison in Raqqa, northwest of the attack on the bus.

The SDF said the offensive, dubbed “Operation al-Jazeera Thunderbolt”, aimed to “eliminate” IS fighters from areas that had been “the source of the recent terrorist attacks”.

The operation is being carried out alongside the US-backed coalition, although there was no immediate confirmation from the international force that they were taking part.

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The SDF statement said that in addition to the thwarted Raqqa attack, IS fighters had recently carried out eight assaults in the Deir Az Zor area, Hasakeh and al-Hol camp for displaced people – predominantly family members of IS members.

Six Kurdish fighters were killed last Monday as IS forces attacked the Raqqa complex, the group’s former de facto stronghold in Syria, in an effort to release other militants who had been detained there.

The so-called caliphate of IS in Iraq and Syria was destroyed in 2014, but the group still has fighters present and continues to claim responsibility for assaults in the two countries.

ISIS continues its intensive attacks on different areas of the Syrian desert, a message for the regime forces and their allies that the Islamic group still has enough power to respond. Clearly, ISIS fighters are still deployed in nearly 4,000 square kilometres all along Jabal Abu Rajmin region in north-eastern Palmyra and the desert of Deir Ezzor and its western countryside, and Al-Sukhna desert and north of the administrative borders of Al-Suwaydaa province.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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