Syrian forces have killed two ISIS members in a raid north of Damascus, the Interior Ministry said, as the extremist group attempts to operate in urban areas.
One of the two dead blew himself up using an explosive belt, authorities said. Security personnel killed the second man in the operation on Saturday in Muadamiyat Al Qalamon, about 25km north of Damascus.
A third man was arrested, resulting in the “dismantling” of the cell. Several “individual weapons and a variety of ammunitions” were seized, according to the ministry.
Tom Barrack, the US special envoy to Syria, appeared to suggest that the operation was conducted jointly with US forces. "Syria is back on our side," Mr Barrack wrote on X, as he shared claims by British analyst Charles Lister that US special forces had linked up with Syrian troops to capture the third man, whom he named as Ahmad Al Badri. There was no official confirmation of American participation.
The Syrian authorities have mounted several operations since May against suspected ISIS cells on the outskirts of Aleppo and Damascus, killing several members of the group, according to officials, who described ISIS as the paramount challenge in the country.
A US-led coalition has also been operating against ISIS and other militants in Syria. In June, the authorities blamed ISIS for a suicide bombing in a Damascus church that killed 25 people.
Washington, however, has relied on the mostly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), as the main ground component in the war in Syria against ISIS. The extremist group has pockets mainly in the central Badia region, and near the border with Iraq to the east. These areas are situated near or within the SDF sphere in the country.
A Syrian security official told The National that since the downfall of the regime of Bashar Al Assad, ISIS members who were operating in the Badia area have been returning to their hometowns near the main cities of Aleppo, Hama and Damascus.
“They go back with at least part of their arsenal, so we cannot take any chance, as we saw from the (latest) raid,” he said.
ISIS fought the former regime and the now defunct Hayat Tahrir Al Sham, an Al Qaeda splinter group whose core now holds power in Syria.
Hayat Tahrir had consolidated its power in the northern governorate of Idlib by eliminating other militants and the western and Arab-backed Free Syrian Army.
Hayat Tahrir swept into Damascus from Idlib on December 8 last year, ousting the Assad regime and ushering in Sunni ascendancy after decades of Alawite-dominated rule. However, the group has responded to US overtures for normalisation and reinvented itself as a bulwark against religious extremism.
The new Syrian leader Ahmad Al Shara, the commander of Hayat Tahrir, has repeatedly said that there will be no Taliban-style in Syria. However, pro-government forces have committed mass sectarian killings during two offensives to subdue minority-inhabited regions this year.
The new government has been tight-lipped about any security co-operation with Washington, while maintaining open channels with the US military. Washington has said that bringing Syria in as an anti-terrorism partner is a major goal of the diplomatic overtures towards Damascus, which were initiated by President Donald Trump in May.
In August, a US official said that US forces killed a senior ISIS member in an attack on the city of Atmeh, near the border with Turkey in Idlib province. Atmeh, once a village, became an urban centre during the civil war due to an influx of refugees from elsewhere in Syria. The US military separately said it killed a “senior Al Qaeda-affiliated attack planner” in an air strike on an unnamed location in Syria on October 2.
