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Islamic State (IS) extremists have killed 115 Syrian fighters of the Syrian regime, security guards and employees of the gas field they seized in the Homs province, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Friday.
The monitor described Thursday’s hostile takeover of the Shaar gas field as the IS’ “biggest” anti-regime operation since it got involved in the Syrian conflict. It added that the fate of some 250 other people who had worked at the field but were missing during the clash remains unknown.
“The number of people, most of them security guards and members of the (paramilitary) National Defense Forces, killed in the IS attack on the Shaar gas field in Homs province has risen to at least 115”, Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman said.
The government hasn’t officially confirmed the deaths yet, but supporters of the Assad regime have posted pictures of the dead on the internet, branding their killings as a “massacre”.
“Eleven of the dead were civilian employees, while the rest were security guards and National Defence Forces members”, Rahman said, adding that they were killed “after they had been taken prisoner,” and that “the fate of more than 250 others, civilians and fighters, remains unknown”.
Gruesome footage allegedly recorded by the extremists at the gas field posted on YouTube show dozens of bodies, a few of them mutilated, scattered across the deserted landscape. In one of the videos, an extremist posed with the bodies and spoke in German interspersed with Arabic religious terms, apparently celebrating the killings.
Condemning the deaths, Abdel Rahman said, “The Observatory condemns summary execution as a war crime, regardless of which side it is committed by in the Syrian conflict”.
“Summary execution is a war crime — whether of civilians or combatants. They are prisoners of war and must not be executed”, he added.