Heavy clashes raged in eastern Syria on Sunday as ISIL cemented control of Deir Ezzor city amid reports of kidnappings and civilian casualties.
Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) launched a shock attack on the north-western suburb of Balighia on Saturday evening, killing 18 regime soldiers and abducting several families, according to sources on the ground.
Around a dozen civilians, most from a single family, were understood to have been killed in retaliatory regime and Russian air strikes.
The assault comes despite a four-month Russian air campaign that Moscow said would beat back the militants, and more than a year of strikes by a US-led coalition against the jihadists in Syria.
Amer Howaidy, a media activist work working to smuggle out news from the mostly ISIL -held city, said the hostages were believed to have been taken to an village in the west of the province where they would be forcibly recruited.
The state news agency and others close to the regime of Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s president, put the death toll significantly higher, reporting that 300 people had been killed. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group, said that 400 people had been abducted, though activists on the ground said they had no knowledge of kidnappings on that scale.
The regime of Assad has long cast itself as the bulwark against Islamic extremism in Syria and sources in Deir Ezzor suggested on on Sunday that the government-cited higher death toll was symptomatic of a need to cast Isil as the most dangerous force inside the country.
"The regime is trying to manipulate the media with this report of ISIS' [ISIL] crimes," said Omar Abu Lila, the director of independent news outlet Deir Ezzor 24.
The Lebanon-based Al-Mayadeen TV, which is close to the Syrian government, also reported a massacre and said Isil killed dozens of people, including women and children, and threw their bodies in the Euphrates River.
Isil’s assault puts the jihadists in control of around 60 per cent of the Deir Ezzor, the capital of an oil-rich region that borders Iraq. The remaining government-held suburbs have been besieged by ISIL forces for more than a year, and without electricity for 11 months.
Regime troops and middlemen have been accused of profiteering from the siege, charging large sums for passage in or out.
According to Deir Ezzor 24, dozens of civilians have died as a result of the blockade, some from starvation, others from preventable diseases for which the medicine was no longer available. Relied workers said civilians could queue for hours in the cold to buy bread supplies that grow more expensive by the month.
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