Beirut, February 17 At least 53 people were shot dead on Friday by members of the Islamic State (IS) jihadist group while picking truffles in the province of Homs, in central Syria, the news agency reported. Syrian official press SANA.
All of the victims died from bullets to the head, while five other people who survived the action had varying degrees of shrapnel wounds, hospital director Walid Ode told SANA. of Palmyra, where they were transferred.
The attackers stormed the group of collectors on the outskirts of Al Sukhna town, where they also set fire to their vehicles, according to one of the survivors.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based NGO and wide network of collaborators on the ground, confirmed the death toll in a statement and assured that seven of them were members of the Syrian army.
This is the second incident involving truffle pickers in less than a week, after ISIL abducted another group of 75 people in another area of the same province last Sunday.
The terrorists murdered at least 16 of them in the days following the abduction, while 25 were released and the rest went missing five days later, according to the Observatory.
In recent years, there have been several kidnappings and armed attacks on citizens while picking truffles in territories where remnants of the Islamic State are still present.
The jihadist formation was defeated territorially in the Arab country in March 2019, but it continues to maintain active cells in various points of the vast Badia desert, which offers them hiding places to which they can flee after their ambushes, facilitating the survival of these groups. ECE
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