ISIL group kills five Kurdish fighters in attack in eastern Syria
The ISIL (ISIS) group has killed five Kurdish fighters in an attack in eastern Syria's Deir Az Zor, the group's news agency has reported, underscoring concerns about its resurgence.
Farhad Shami, spokesperson for Syria's Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), confirmed to Reuters news agency on Monday that five of its members were killed in the attack, which he described as 'one of the deadliest' against the group in a while.
Deir Az Zor city was captured by ISIL in 2014, but the Syrian army retook it in 2017.
The ISIL group once controlled vast swathes of Syria and Iraq – including Raqqa, about 160km (100 miles) east of Aleppo and Mosul, in northern Iraq – imposing hardline rule over millions of people.
Former ISIL leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had declared a caliphate over the two countries in 2014 before he was killed in a raid by United States special forces in northwest Syria in 2019 as the group collapsed.
At its peak, the group ruled over an area half the size of the United Kingdom and was notorious for its brutality. It beheaded civilians, slaughtered 1,700 captured Iraqi soldiers in a short period, and enslaved and raped thousands of women from the Yazidi community, one of Iraq's oldest religious minorities.
A coalition of more than 80 countries, led by the US, was formed to fight the group in September 2014. The alliance continues to carry out raids against ISIL's hideouts in Syria and Iraq.
The war against the group officially ended in March 2019, when US-backed and Kurdish-led fighters of the SDF captured the eastern Syrian town of Baghouz, which was the last sliver of land ISIL controlled.
The group was also defeated in Iraq in July 2017, when Iraqi forces recaptured Mosul. Three months later, ISIL suffered a major blow when the SDF took back the Syrian northern city of Raqqa, which was the group's de facto capital.
ISIL has recently been trying to stage a comeback, continuing to recruit members and to claim responsibility for deadly attacks around the world.
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