IS leaves Druze reeling from heaviest losses of war

Beirut : The death toll in coordinated Islamic State group attacks in Syria’s Sweida neared 250 on Thursday, the Druze-majority province’s heaviest loss of life of the seven-year civil war.

Sweida, which is mainly government-held, had been largely insulated from the conflict raging in the rest of the country since 2011. But Wednesday’s onslaught shattered the relative calm and showed that IS retains the ability to mount deadly attacks against civilians, despite being ousted from their last remaining urban pockets in recent months.

Four suicide bombers struck the city of Sweida, while other IS fighters attacked villages to its north and east with guns and explosives. The death toll reached 246 on Thursday, 135 of them civilians, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group. The others killed were pro-government fighters or residents who had taken up arms to defend their villages. 

“The toll keeps rising as civilians who were wounded are dying and people who were unaccounted for are found dead,” Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said. State television broadcast footage of the funeral processions in Sweida, showing men in the traditional white caps of the Druze minority exchanging condolences. At least 56 jihadists died carrying out the assault.