85 Syrian troops killed

FE Team | Published: July 27, 2014 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2026 06:01:00

BEIRUT, July 26, (agencies): At least 85 Syrian army troops were killed as the jihadist Islamic State advanced on a regime position in the northern province of Raqa, a monitoring group said Saturday.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the fate of around 200 other soldiers remained unknown, as the IS assault forced the army to pull back late on Friday.
The Division 17 base has fallen from army control but the jihadists have not yet moved into all the site's buildings "for fear of air strikes", said the Britain-based group's director, Rami Abdel Rahman.
The IS lost at least 28 jihadist fighters, he said. The Observatory said more than 50 troops were summarily executed, 19 more were killed in a double suicide attack and at least 16 others had died in the IS assault launched early Thursday.
"Hundreds of troops surviving withdrew on Friday to safe places-either to nearby villages whose residents oppose IS or to nearby Brigade 93 -- but the fate of some 200 remains unknown," said Abdel Rahman.
"Some of the executed troops were beheaded, and their bodies and severed heads put on display in Raqa city," stronghold of the feared IS, he said.
Video shot by the jihadists and distributed via YouTube showed the men, apparently inside troops' former living quarters in Division 17, burning a portrait of President Bashar al-Assad.
One jihadist behind the camera refers to the army as being composed of "heretics, apostates", while showing bottles of spirits and cigarettes that the troops had been keeping.
The assault on Division 17 comes less than two weeks after the IS killed 270 security guards, employees and members of the paramilitary National Defence Forces during an assault on a gas field in Homs, central Syria.
On Friday, the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria said IS fighters accused of atrocities were expected to be added to a UN list of possible war crime indictees.
Meanwhile: Syria's Al-Qaeda affiliate has released a video of a young US suicide bomber from Florida who blew himself up at an army post in the northwest of the country.
Moner Mohammad Abu Salha, alias Abu Hurayra al-Amriki, was believed to be the first American national to carry out such an attack in Syria's more than three-year-old war.
"I want to rest in the afterlife, not in this world... My heart is not at peace here. Hopefully it will be in heaven," Abu Hurayra says in broken Arabic in the 17-minute video posted on YouTube on Friday by Al-Nusra Front.
The footage, released via Al-Nusra's official channel Al-Manara Al-Baydaa, also shows Abu Hurayra saying: "I came to Syria without money to buy a rifle or a pouch.
"God gave me a rifle and a pouch and everything, and... (then) he gave me even more," says the bearded man in his early 20s.
The American jihadist carried out a May 25 truck bomb attack on an army base in Jabal al-Arbaeen area of northwest Syria's Idlib province.
Six days later, the State Department confirmed that the US citizen, who travelled to Syria in 2013, had carried out a suicide attack.
According to a Facebook page in his name, he was a fan of the Miami Heat basketball team and his favourite artists included Jay Z.
The parents of "the Florida boy" own a grocery store, with his father from Jordan and mother a convert to Islam, US newspapers reported.