By Theodore Shoebat
Islamic terrorists in Syria ambushed and murdered twenty-six Syrian soldiers, the deadliest attack since the beginning of 2021. The slaughter marks the cold realty that Islamist problem in Syria is still alive and very active. As we read in the Jerusalem Post:
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) reported that Islamic State (IS) fighters ambushed a military convoy of Syrian army soldiers and militiamen loyal to the Assad regime, early Monday morning. At least 26 pro-regime troops were killed in the attack, making it the deadliest since the beginning of the year. Eleven IS fighters were also killed. Despite the high death toll, Western media has largely ignored the incident.“On 8 February, Islamic State militants conducted an ambush attack on a military convoy killing at least seven Syrian army soldiers of the 17th Division and at least 19 militiamen from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Brigades,” Oliver Harper, an analyst at Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Centre (JTIC) confirmed. The attack occurred in the Al-Mayadeen desert in Syria’s eastern Deir ez-Zur governorate. The convoy was searching the area for unidentified combatants when it was attacked, SOHR and Harper reported.
It has been almost two years since former President Donald Trump claimed that “100%” of Syrian territory held by IS had been recaptured, yet in some areas of the Arab country, IS continues to be a concrete reality. “It is far from being finished business,” Yoram Schweitzer, a senior research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) and head of the Program on Terrorism and Low Intensity Conflict, told The Media Line. “If you follow the actions of what they call IS and the Salafi-jihadi [organizations] in the last year, you can see that they’re active,” he said, speaking about not only Syria but the entire region. “[IS] has disappeared into the heart of the desert, to lawless areas from which it continues to act, in Syria, in Iraq as well as in the Sinai Peninsula,” he said.The senior researcher called the present situation “a clear and glaring ticking time bomb”. He explained that there is a large number of Salafi jihadists in Syria, not all affiliated with IS. “This case of trained Salafi-jihadi militants and children that grew up in such an environment, without education, without alternatives, that will go out to the world as men, after being indoctrinated. … This is an issue that will explode.”