IS has killed more than 4,000 people since Syria’s territorial defeat: Monitor

In March 2019, the jihadist group lost its last vestiges of Syrian territory in a military campaign led by Kurds and supported by a US-led coalition, but remnants of the group continue to launch deadly attacks from desert hideouts.

Since 2019, IS fighters have “killed around 4,100 people in more than 2,550 operations in areas controlled by the regime or the semi-autonomous Kurdish administration,” said a report by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Most of the victims were soldiers, government supporters and Kurdish-led fighters, but 627 civilians were also among the victims, the British observatory said.

More than half of the 4,085 victims fell in Syria’s vast Badia Desert, which stretches from the outskirts of Damascus to the Iraqi border.

In total, “2,744 people have been killed by the IS group in various areas of the Syrian desert since its formal collapse in 2019,” said the observer, citing a network of sources in the country.

According to the Observatory, IS fighters have killed more than 2,500 government supporters and soldiers since the fall of the so-called caliphate in Badia.

“Hardly a day goes by without bombings, ambushes, targeted operations or surprise attacks” by jihadists in the region, the report says.

“The regime’s forces and groups loyal to them counter these operations with regular security campaigns deep in the desert, with … Russian warplanes attacking the desert almost daily,” it continues.

The group has suffered severe damage and lost more than 2,000 fighters, including senior leaders, since 2019, the report said.

According to a United Nations report published in January, IS has a total of 3,000 to 5,000 fighters in Iraq and Syria. Badia serves as the group’s logistics and operations center in Syria.

Since it broke out in March 2011 with the brutal suppression of anti-government protests by Damascus, the war in Syria has claimed the lives of more than half a million people and forced millions more to flee.

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