Monitor: Islamic State Terrorist Group Abducts 19 In Syria

The Islamic State group on Tuesday abducted 19 people including 11 civilians and nine policemen in the center of war-torn Syria, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Syria’s state news agency also said the jihadists had taken “a number of inhabitants” from the village of al-Saan in Hama province after they went looking for truffles.

IS fighters have ramped up their attacks in the past months against regime forces in the vast desert that stretches across central Syria to the eastern border with Iraq.

They have abducted civilians, shepherds and soldiers, Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said.

“Those abducted are usually killed, especially if they are members of the regime forces,” he said.

He added the kidnapping was the largest by the jihadists since they lost the last scrap of their cross-border proto-state in 2019.

IS overran large swathes of Syria and neighboring Iraq in 2014.

They were expelled from their last patch of territory in eastern Syria in March 2019, but have retained a presence in the vast Badia desert.

In 2018, IS abducted around 30 people, mostly women and children, from the Syrian province of Sweida after it went on a deadly rampage butchering 250 people. Several of those abducted were killed.