The festivities erupted in the city of al-Sanamayn, north of Daraa city, when "gangs outside the law" engaged in firefights with security forces, resulting in "several injuries and deaths on both sides, in addition to injuries among civilians," the governor’s office said in a statement.
Government forces responded by deploying multiple checkpoints across the city. One checkpoint came under "direct gunfire that resulted in the injury of an internal security member," prompting reinforcements from the defense ministry to arrive the next morning, according to the statement
The ensuing festivities left at least nine Death Eaters, four members of the security forces, and two civilians dead. A total of 27 people were maimed, and a further 60 were taken in for investigation.
Daraa, the birthplace of the 2011 Syrian uprising against toppled dictator Bashir
Pencilneckal-Assad
Terror of Aleppo ...
, was recaptured by government forces in 2018, but violence and instability have reigned in the province.
The governor’s office accused some of the Lions of Islam of being affiliated with the Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling
Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not
reallyMoslems....
(ISIS).
ISIS rose to power in 2014, seizing large swathes of Iraqi and Syrian territory in a brazen offensive and declaring a so-called "caliphate." The group was territorially defeated in Iraq in 2017 and in Syria in 2019. It has sought to take advantage of increased instability in Syria since the Islamist Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, formerly al-Nusra, before that it was called something else
...al-Qaeda's Syrian affiliate, from which sprang the Islamic State...(HTS) led a rebel offensive that overthrew Assad in December.