On Monday, Russian warplanes targeted locations where ISIS fighters are holed up in the Badia, and carried out 8 strikes at the (Aleppo – Hama – Raqqa) triangle and the administrative borders between Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor, without receiving information about losses.
During the past 48 hours, it carried out 28 air strikes, targeting ISIS positions in which it is entrenched in the Badia of Rusafa in Raqqa and Athria in Hama countryside, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which indicated that the Russian raids reached more than 674 raids in the Badia since the beginning of January. .
The director of the observatory, Rami Abdel Rahman, told Sky News Arabia that Russia launched more than 12,000 raids on the Badia in 2021, killing more than 500 ISIS militants.
On the reason for the terrorist organization’s entrenchment in the Badia, Abdel Rahman said, “It is a difficult geographical area and a vast desert that constitutes about half of the Syrian territory, and therefore ISIS hides in it in the form of cells and small groups that carry out attacks on the regime forces or the armed militias loyal to it in the desert.”
The director of the observatory denied that ISIS ended its existence in 2019 (the year in which its defeat in Syria was announced), saying that what happened was the end of its control over populated areas, while it is still continuing its operations in large areas.
Concerning the geography of the Badia, the Syrian Kurdish journalist Zana Omar told Sky News Arabia that it is characterized by a difficult geography and almost devoid of residents, and its terrain helps ISIS to cover itself with camouflage and launch rapid attacks on the Syrian army’s transiting points and buses in those areas.
The desert extends between the eastern countryside of Hama and Homs to the Iraqi border, and from the countryside of Deir ez-Zor and Raqqa in northern Syria to the Jordanian-Syrian border, and its area is more than 75,000 square kilometers out of Syria’s area of about 185,000 km, and it is open to the Iraqi desert in which the cells of the organization are located. thickly, depending on age.
Omar estimates the death toll from March 24, 2019 until mid-January 2021, at 1,636 dead from the Syrian army or its militias of Syrian and non-Syrian nationalities, including at least 3 Russians, and 163 militias affiliated with Iran, who were killed in ISIS bombings and ambushes. West of the Euphrates, the Badia of Deir ez-Zor, Raqqa, Homs, As-Suwayda, Hama and Aleppo.
Regarding the sources of ISIS’s strength, Omar says that it is “obtaining logistical supplies. The Badia desert forms a supply line for the organization’s cells in the east of the Euphrates (the areas of influence of the Kurdish-majority Syrian Democratic Forces and the International Coalition to Combat Terrorism), especially what is known as the Rusafa desert, which witnessed more From once, the organization’s cells moved from west of the Euphrates to its east.”
Omar pointed out that the presence of ISIS in these areas dates back to a very early stage of the Syrian war, especially when controlling the city of Palmyra in 2015, and at the beginning of the collapse in 2019, when it sent its members and money to the Badia, which he describes as the organization’s financial and human reservoir to support Its activity in the east and west of the Euphrates and Iraq.
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