In Syria, the Islamic State group has rebuilt its nuisance capacity
View of Raqqa, the former capital of the Islamic State organization in Syria, May 1, 2019. Delil souleiman / AFP
Text by: Paul Khalifeh Follow
3 min
Twenty months after the demise of the Islamic State group's self-proclaimed caliphate in Syria, the organization is implementing a guerrilla strategy in the east of the country.
Last weekend, twenty-five Syrian soldiers and proxy militiamen were killed in a series of attacks.
Since March 2019, the troops in Damascus and their allies have lost 2,000 men and the extremist group a thousand fighters, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
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From our correspondent in Beirut,
Little is said about this war in the media, yet military operations take place at an almost daily rate over a vast territory;
a formal war that has for its battlefield the central desert of Syria, called the Badia, which stretches from the city of Homs, in the center of the country, to the border with Iraq, in the east , and up to Jordan, to the south.
It is a war without a visible front that is being fought over an area of 60,000 square kilometers.
Despite dozens of offensives and search operations, the Syrian army and its allies have still not succeeded in establishing full control over the desert area.
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The firepower used against the Islamic State group is, however, impressive: the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reports about a hundred Russian air raids since the beginning of December.
Some 600 strikes by helicopters and fighter-bombers in November.
Despite all these raids and numerous ground offensives, ISIS still has comfortable mobility and the ability to carry out simultaneous attacks in locations tens of kilometers apart.
This means, in military jargon, that the organization's command and control system remains operational and effective.
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Kurdish-controlled regions not spared
The Islamic State group's guerrillas are also active in areas controlled by Kurdish forces, supported by the United States, east of the Euphrates.
In this region, IS actions mainly take the form of bombings against patrols of Kurdish forces, or the fire of mortars and rockets against oil wells.
On December 2, ten workers at an oil field in eastern Syria were killed.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has recorded since the beginning of the month around thirty attacks blamed on Daesh in areas controlled by the Kurds, where the American army still deploys several hundred soldiers.
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An army of 10,000 men
The American intelligence services estimate that the Islamic State group has rebuilt an army of 10,000 men in Iraq and Syria.
Syrian sources assure that in Syria alone, the extremist organization can mobilize more.
This army is made up mainly of survivors of the former strongholds of the self-proclaimed caliphate, but also of new combatants recruited from Bedouin tribes and ex-detainees from incarceration camps set up in regions controlled by the Kurds.
The Islamic State group had anticipated the dismantling of its territorial caliphate.
He had set up caches and stored weapons, ammunition and food in the desert in anticipation of a guerrilla war.
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