Islamic State (IS) fighters have executed dozens of members of the Syrian army they took hostage after capturing an air base in the northeast of the country, a group monitoring the violence said yesterday.
The militant group, formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, stormed Tabqa air base on Sunday after days of clashes with the army, and said it had captured and killed soldiers and officers in one of the fiercest confrontations yet between the two sides.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the conflict using sources on the ground, said the soldiers who were executed had been trying to escape from the airport when they were taken hostage by Islamic State fighters.
Photo: AFP
A video posted online yesterday by Islamic State supporters appeared to show members of the group making scores of Syrian army hostages walk and run through the desert in their underwear.
Reuters could not confirm the contents of the video, which was posted on YouTube and social media. It showed at least 135 men, some with their hands on their heads, running barefoot through a desert landscape as armed men jeered them.
It was not clear what happened to the men afterwards, but photos posted by Islamic State supporters online on Wednesday appeared to show them gunning down at least seven members of the army they had taken hostage.
Syrian state media confirmed the attack on the base, but has not reported any deaths or any army members being captured. It has said IS suffered heavy losses in the battle over the base.
Tabqa was the army’s last foothold in an area otherwise controlled by the Islamic State militants, who have seized large swathes of Syria and Iraq in recent months with the aim of setting up a transborder Islamic caliphate.
Islamist opposition fighters in Syria also took control of the Quneitra crossing point on the demarcation line with the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, activists said on Wednesday.
The move could bring Islamist forces within 180m of territory controlled by Israel. An activist in the area, contacted by Skype, said a coalition of Islamists, including members of the al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front, opened an assault on the government-held crossing early on Wednesday. The status of a UN force that is supposed to monitor the crossing point was unclear.
The Israeli military said one soldier and an Israeli civilian were wounded by “errant fire” from the clashes at Quneitra, prompting an artillery barrage against two Syrian army positions in the Golan Heights — the latest of several occasions when Syria’s civil war has spilled into Israel, prompting retaliation.
Israel has said that it has no interest in further involvement in the fighting.
The Syria conflict is now in its fourth year with an estimated death toll in excess of 190,000.
Israeli troops saw large plumes of smoke as gunfire and explosions rattled the area, news reports said.
Yaakov Amidror, a former Israeli national security adviser, said reports of the Nusra Front taking control of the Quneitra crossing could be “very significant” if the group managed to link that position to its stronghold in Daraa, in southern Syria, and other areas.
However, Amidror, who served under Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said Israel should not interfere in the conflict and should respond only if attacked or to provide humanitarian assistance to wounded people on the demarcation line.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the fighting killed at least 20 government soldiers and an unknown number of the attackers.
Syria lost the strategic Golan Heights to Israel in the 1967 war. Israel later annexed the area, but left Quneitra. It has since been depicted by the authorities in Damascus as an emblem of Israeli expansion and remains in ruins.
Although the town has little strategic value, insurgents have been fighting to drive off government forces for more than a year, said Abu Mossab, another activist in the region.
Accounts of the fighting were unclear, but some activists said members of the Western-backed and secular Free Syrian Army were also involved in the assault. Clashes were reported from several locations after rebel forces set out from a village they seized in May.
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