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EDITOR IN CHIEF- ABDULLAH BIN SALIM AL SHUEILI

IS kidnaps 36 women, children from south Syria, says monitor

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BEIRUT: At least 36 women and children have been kidnapped by the IS group in Syria’s southern province of Sweida, a war monitor said on Monday. Rami Abdel-Rahman, the head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said the kidnapping took place last Wednesday during coordinated attacks by IS on Sweida, which left more than 200 people dead. “Twenty women and 16 children were kidnapped by IS on July 25. Four of them them managed to flee to Druze areas, two others died and 30 are still in captivity,” he said, adding that the 30 are 14 women and 16 children.


Another 17 men were unaccounted for, but it was unclear if they were also kidnapped.


IS has released a video of a woman urging Syrian President Bashar al Assad to meet the demands of the group.


“We ask (President) Bashar al Assad... to carry out the IS demands of releasing (the group’s) prisoners and to stop a military campaign on Yarmouk basin so that they would release us,” the woman, who identified herself as Suad Adib Abu Ammar, said in the video.


She added that IS will execute the hostages if the Syrian government does not heed the demands.


Sweida, which is mainly government-held and populated with members of Syria’s Druze minority, had been largely insulated from the conflict raging in the rest of the country since 2011.


But last Wednesday, a string of suicide blasts and shootings claimed by IS left more than 250 people dead in the provincial capital and nearby villages, most of them civilians.


After the attack IS also abducted several dozen women and children from one village, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and Sweida residents.


According to news outlet Sweida24, the 36 civilians were kidnapped on Wednesday from the village of Al Shabki, in the eastern hinterlands of Sweida province. Sweida24 and other online outlets published a video that appeared to show one of the hostages making demands of the Syrian government, purportedly on IS’s behalf.


AFP could not independently verify its authenticity, but several Sweida residents confirmed that a woman appearing in the footage was among those missing after the attacks.


The hostages mainly hail from two large families in Al Shabki, said reporter Nour Radwan, who heads Sweida24. The remote village lies in the eastern edges of Sweida province and suffered some of the deadliest violence from Wednesday’s attacks, with more than 60 civilians killed in Al Shabki alone, Radwan said.


“Most of its residents are farmers and don’t have much more than hunting rifles in terms of weapons, so there was little resistance from Al Shabki compared to other villages,” he said. “When IS saw that, it kidnapped a first batch of people from their homes and took them east towards the Badiya, according to survivors,” Nour added. — Agencies


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