“Two members of the Syrian Democratic Forces were killed in an attack carried out by ISIS cells with machine guns targeting a checkpoint … in the town of Dhiban in the eastern countryside of Deir ez-Zor,” said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor.
It is the latest in a series of rising ISIS attacks in Syria, particularly in the vast expanses of its eastern and northern deserts where the group launches surprise attacks amid a security vacuum.
The gunmen were able to flee the area after carrying out the attack, according to the monitor.
ISIS rose to power and seized swathes of Iraqi and Syrian land in a brazen offensive in 2014, declaring a so-called “caliphate.”
While the group was declared territorially defeated in 2017 and 2019 respectively, it still continues to pose serious security risks through hit-and-run attacks, bombings, and abductions, especially across the vast expanses of the Syrian desert as well as several Iraqi provinces.
The Kurdish-led and US-backed SDF, who control northeast Syria (Rojava), fought the lion’s share of the battle against ISIS and arrested thousands of the terror group’s fighters along with their wives and children when they crushed ISIS territorially and took the group’s last stronghold in Syria in 2019.
In late March, the SDF warned that ISIS still poses a threat to the world and the region as its defeat “requires dismantling its ideological breeding ground,”
“ISIS is still trying to recruit new terrorist elements, attempting to radicalize them into its ranks,” said the SDF, calling on the international community to “collaborate effectively” with its forces.
On Wednesday, a member of Rojava’s internal security forces (Asayish) and another SDF fighter were killed in separate ISIS attacks in Hasaka province.