Resistance Group Announces Formation in Syria

Date: 02 February 2025 - 21:54

News ID: ۱۳۶۵۰۶

BEIRUT (Dispatches) -- A new resistance group has emerged in Syria, pledging to stage “surprise” strikes against Israeli forces and “terrorist gangs” of the country’s self-proclaimed “president” Abu Muhammad al-Julani.
The Islamic Resistance Front in Syria (IRFS) passed the remarks in a statement, noting that it had already staged one such strike against Israeli troops in the province of Quneitra in the country’s extreme southwest in late January.
The operation, it said, served to mark the start of its retaliation “against the Israeli enemy alongside our operations against the terrorist gangs of Julani,” it stated.
The development verified the predictions that have been made by many regional officials and resistance figures concerning imminent emergence of resistance fighters in the Arab country.
Less than two months into Syria’s takeover by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, Israel has ramped up its deadly aggression against the country under the pretext of preventing spillover of violence into the Israeli occupied territories.
Despite the heavy toll Israeli attacks have taken on Syria’s civilian and military infrastructures, Julani has said he did not seek any conflict with Tel Aviv.
The new Syrian resistance faction described the circumstances surrounding its January 31 anti-Israeli strike, saying the operation forced Israeli troops to “retreat and withdraw.”
“We will not allow the Israeli regime to occupy our land, and we will be on the lookout for you and the Julani gangs with our precise ambushes and surprise attacks,” it said.
On Friday, Israeli Army Radio reported that armed men had opened fire on Israeli forces in the Quneitra countryside.
Israeli correspondent Doron Kadosh described the development as a “particularly unusual incident,” marking the first time in two months that armed men had reached “the area of operation of our forces and opened fire on them.”
“A group calling itself the Islamic Resistance Front in Syria claimed responsibility for firing at our forces...and it is too early to know whether this is the beginning of organized armed resistance” to Israeli activity in Syria, he said.
The IRFS is reportedly largely made up of Syria’s Shia Muslims, and previously used to call itself the “Southern Liberation Front.”
According to a statement, the group was established to “protect the Syrian people and push Israel out of Syrian territory.”

Chaos has continued over in Syria since the collapse of the former government.

New reports said the body of a Syrian scientist and doctor had been found in the countryside of the capital Damascus, adding to the number of the scholars that have been fatally targeted.

The lifeless body of Hassan al-Ibrahim was found in the village of Ma’araba in the capital’s Rif Damascus suburb, Lebanon’s Al-Mayadeen television network reported.

The victim, apparently hailing from he country’s Alawite community, used to teach at the country’s Higher Institute of Scientific Research.

The sources said Ibrahim had been kidnapped from his workplace five days before, adding that he was assassinated at gunpoint. Other sources said he was killed with a headshot.

In December, gunmen assassinated Dr. Hamdi Ismail Nadi, a prominent Syrian scientist in Damascus.

On Friday, militants shot and killed nearly a dozen civilians at a Shia-populated village in Syria’s central province of Hama, amid ongoing raids and summary executions by gunmen affiliated with the HTS administration.

Local sources in the Hama governorate said masked assailants stormed the village of Arza, abducting several residents before executing 15 of them near the Orontes River.

The so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that “armed men committed a massacre” on Friday and killed “10 citizens in Arza village in the northern Hama countryside.”

The Britain-based observatory said the gunmen then quickly fled the area, leaving the bodies behind.

The monitor said at least 105 such incidents have taken place across Syria since the beginning of the current year, claiming the lives of 228 people, including five women and one child.