DAMASCUS (Dispatches) – The Daesh group has claimed responsibility for two attacks in southern Syria, including one on new regime forces that an opposition war monitor described as the first on the Syrian army to be adopted by the extremists since the fall of Bashar Assad.
In two separate statements issued late Thursday, Daesh said that in the first attack, a bomb was detonated targeting a “vehicle of the apostate regime,” leaving seven soldiers dead or wounded. It said the attack occurred “last Thursday,” or May 22, in the al-Safa area in the desert of the southern province of Sweida.
Daesh said that the second attack occurred this week in a nearby area during which a bomb targeted members of the U.S.-backed so-called Free Syrian Army, claiming that it killed one militant and wounded three.
There was no comment from the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS)-led administration in Syria on the claim of the attack and a spokesperson for the Free Syrian Army didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment by The Associated Press.
The Britain-based so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that the attack on government forces killed one civilian and wounded three soldiers, describing it as the first such attack to be claimed by Daesh against Syrian forces since the fall of Assad in December.
In a statement picked up by SITE Intelligence Group on Thursday, Daesh said it had planted an “explosive device” on a vehicle of the HTS-led forces in the southern province of Suwayda.
The UK-based monitoring group, SOHR, said three members of the 70th Division of HTS forces were wounded when a patrol was hit by a remote-control landmine on Wednesday, adding a man, who was accompanying them, was killed in the desert area.
Abu Mohamad al-Jolani, who is a former senior commander in both Al-Qaeda and Daesh, is now the de facto president of Syria.
In December, armed groups led by HTS militants, announced that they had fully captured the Syrian capital and announced the fall of President Assad’s government.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently described how the Israeli military helped the HTS takeover of Syria in December.
The security situation in Syria under the HTS - an offshoot of the Al-Qaeda terrorist group - remains tenuous. Incidents of sectarian violence, including the massacre of hundreds of Alawites in March, have hardened fears among minority groups about the now dominant militants.