Daesh militants on Thursday attacked a village in eastern Syria recently captured by regime forces, threatening to cut the main highway linking the capital, Damascus, with the city of Deir Ezzor, Syrian opposition activists said.
The attack on Al-Shola village was one of the strongest staged by Daesh in the region recently, three weeks after Syrian regime troops broke a nearly three-year long siege of parts of Deir Ezzor, the capital of the oil-rich province that carries the same name.
It was also a surprise as Daesh militants have been squeezed in the province by Russian-backed Syrian troops and US-backed members of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Al-Shola was under attack on Thursday. Omar Abou Leila, of the monitoring group DeirEzzor 24, and the Daesh-linked Aamaq news agency said the extremists captured the village.
Abou Laila said Daesh fighters appear to have come from the town of Mayadeen, one of the largest remaining strongholds of the militants in Syria.
Earlier Thursday, the observatory said regime forces have laid siege to Daesh-held neighborhoods of Deir Ezzor but Abou Leila could not confirm that.
The race for control of the territory and resources in this province bordering Iraq has caused friction between regime forces and the Kurdish-led SDF. The US-backed fighters say regime forces and Russian warplanes have attacked them. Russia warned it would retaliate after it said Syrian regime troops came under fire from the US-backed forces.
Russia and the US say they are working out a mechanism to avoid friction in the common fight against Daesh militants.
Meanwhile, a Christian legislator was Thursday elected speaker of Parliament in predominantly Muslim Syria for the first time in decades.
Hammudeh Sabbagh, a 58-year-old Syriac Orthodox Christian graduate in law and member of President Bashar Assad’s Baath Party from Hasakeh province in northeast Syria, won 193 votes out of 252 cast, state media reported.
He became the first Christian to hold the post since Fares El-Khoury who served multiple terms before and after the French mandate of 1920-1946.
Before the 2011 outbreak of war in Syria, Christians of 11 different denominations made up about five percent of the population.
Around half of Syria’s 1.5 million Christians have since fled, according to Chaldean Catholic Bishop Antoine Audo.
Christians have tried largely to keep their distance from the conflict, in which they have been targeted by radical opposition groups while the regime portrays itself as the secular defender of minorities.
Daesh, for its part, has carried out mass kidnappings of Christians and destroyed their churches.
Assad’s family has ruled Syria since 1970, and so far the Syrian president has remained in power despite the civil war, now in its seventh year, sparked by an uprising against him.