A week after seizing a major oilfield offensive, the extremist Islamic State on Thursday targeted two more key government garrisons, posting photos on the Internet of headless bodies the group claims had been soldiers killed in the attacks.
Among the dead, anti-government activists told McClatchy, were Gen. Samir Aslan, the head of military intelligence in Raqqa province, and Gen. Miziad Salameh, the commander of Regiment 121, a major military installation in Hasaka province.
The death toll from the confrontations was uncertain, but at least 30 soldiers were killed when Islamic State forces overran Division 17, a unit of about 300 based a half-mile outside of Raqqa, the Islamists’ administrative capital and the only Syrian provincial capital not in government hands. The base was the largest military facility in eastern Syria still controlled by the government, according to the anti-government Raqqa Media Center.
The Islamist State said that its attack on Division 17 outside Raqqa began late Wednesday with the detonation of two suicide bombs. By Thursday morning, the Islamic State had captured the headquarters of one of the division’s battalions and had taken control of a strategic hilltop inside the base.
The government responded by shelling the city of Raqqa and firing two SCUD missiles from the Qalamoun area north of Damascus toward Raqqa. Neither missile did any damage, however; one exploded in midair and the other landed harmlessly in an empty area.
Opposition sources in Raqqa said government planes launched 13 air attacks on the city and the Division 17 base. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based opposition group that monitors violence in Syria, said that at least 35 Islamic State fighters had been killed or injured. It said the dead and wounded Islamists were taken by ambulance to hospitals in Raqqa.
Syria’s official media, which is devoting most of its attention to the Israeli “aggression” in Gaza, ignored the Islamic State offensive. But government supporters took to social media to demand that the government launch efforts to rescue both Division 17 and the city of Hasaka.
Activists close to the Islamic State posted on Twitter that the offensives involved 1,400 fighters _ 600 in Raqqa
Hammam al Raqqa, an Islamic State activist who was reached via Skype, told McClatchy from Raqqa that after the Islamists “clean” Raqqa, Hasaka and Deir el Zour of regime forces, the jihadis would target Homs and Damascus to the east. Hammam said that the government resistance to Thursday’s attacks had been very strong but that it had been overcome by suicidal fighters who “came to die.”
He said that most of the fighters involved in the attack were from Azerbaijan and Chechnya, with a few Syrians and Saudis.
Islamist State sympathizers on Twitter blamed U.S.-backed moderate rebels for the delay in the fall of the Assad government, which has withstood more than three years of civil war.
“If they (moderate rebels) only obeyed the Islamic State from the beginning, it would have liberated the whole of Syria,” read one tweet. “Islamic State said to them from the beginning: leave us alone to face the infidels . . . but it was ‘the damnation’ of the dollar ‘that prevented them.’”