Beirut: The Islamic State group has killed at least 68 US-backed fighters battling to oust the jihadists from their eastern Syria holdout of Hajin, a war monitor said on Saturday.
IS on Friday dispatched suicide bombers as part of a counter-attack against the Syrian Democratic Forces, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, raising the death toll from an earlier figure of 41.
The SDF fighters, who are backed by US-led coalition air strikes, were killed overnight, the Britain-based Observatory said. “The death toll has increased due to the discovery of new victims on the front line and the existence of 100 wounded,” said Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman.
In a statement on the Telegram messaging app, IS said it had attacked the village of Sousa on Friday and detonated a car bomb near the village of Al-Baghuza further south, down the Euphrates river.
The SDF last month launched an offensive against the jihadists in the Hajin pocket on the eastern banks of the Euphrates, in Deir Ezzor province.
IS has staged a bloody fightback. Since September 10, 270 SDF fighters and 496 IS jihadists have been killed in the offensive, the Observatory says.
The coalition estimates that 2,000 IS fighters remain in the Hajin area. Last week the Observatory said coalition air strikes had killed 41 civilians in Sousa, 10 of them children, on October 18 and 19. (PTI)
