Daily Times

Syria’s northeastern city of Deir Ezzor has become a site of abject horror as an attack by militants of Islamic State (IS) on the city’s government-held areas reportedly killed anywhere between 135 to 300 civilians and troops (the count varies from source to source). According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, in addition to massacring people in the city, the IS militants are also said to have abducted more than 400 civilians from the territories it captured. The abducted include women, children and family members of pro-government fighters. However it also merits mentioning that this is not an entirely undisputed account, since there are conflicting reports that cite unnamed “Syrian rebel activists” who deny that such a massacre and mass abduction took place. Nonetheless, both the state media and a neutral watchdog have separately reported that this incident happened. Beyond the strength of sources, mass killings and mass abductions are part of the morbid modus operandi of IS as such incidents have occurred whenever it has captured new territory, thereby giving more credence to these reports. But even if such incidents are a norm for the IS, this attack is still being touted as accounting for one of the highest death tolls for a single day in the nearly five-year long war. There is a genuine fear and apprehension about the fate of the abducted citizens, who have been taken to IS’s strongholds. The sordid track record of the IS suggests that the abducted males will be brutally executed while the females will be turned into sex slaves.

Despite this attack, many parts of the city of Deir Ezzor are still under regime control and fighting continues, as Syrian forces in conjunction with their Russian allies are launching a counteroffensive. Regardless of the result of this counteroffensive, the nature of this attack reveals that despite all stakeholders in Syria reaching the conclusion that IS is the major threat, there is still no unified front to combat this menace. On one side of the divide regarding strategy, there is the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad that is backed by Iran, Hezbollah, and, more recently, Russia. The focus of this alliance has been to push back against IS, along with all other rebel forces that are seen as agents of destabilisation and chaos. On the other side, there are the western powers that until recently were singularly obsessed with ousting al-Assad at the expense of disregarding the threat of IS, as they continually supported and funded the aforementioned ‘moderate’ rebels. There is also Syria’s influential neighbour Turkey, which has a dangerously ambiguous relationship with IS since the latter has many of the same enemies as itself (al-Assad and the Kurds). This confusion and conflicting goals give IS room to manoeuvre. Until all stakeholders are on the same page, IS will continue to exploit the gaps provided to it. *