Isis fighters abduct up to 400 civilians in major attack on Deir ez-Zor 
Kareem Shaheen and Agence France-Presse in Beirut
Sunday 17 January 2016 12.55 EST
Islamic State fighters have abducted more than 400 civiliansafter capturing new ground in a major assault on the Syrian city of Deir ez-Zor that left dozens dead, according to reports.
The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Isis killed at least 135 people in the multi-front attack that began on Saturday.
The dead included 85 civilians and 50 regime fighters, according to the human rights monitor, which said on Sunday that Isis also kidnapped more than 400 civilians from captured territory.
“Those abducted, all of whom are Sunnis, include women, children and family members of pro-regime fighters,” said the director of the Observatory, Rami Abdel Rahman.
He said they had been taken to areas under Isis control in the west of Deir ez-Zor province and to the border with Raqqa province – Isis’s main stronghold in Syria – to the northwest.
The monitor said at least 42 Isis fighters had been killed in the attack and that fighting was ongoing, with regime forces backed by Russian airstrikes trying to recapture lost ground. It added that regime forces were bringing additional troops and military equipment from elsewhere in the city to the battlefront.
Syria’s state news agency, Sana, said at least 300 civilians, “most of them women, children and elderly people”, were killed in the assault. It denounced the deaths as a “massacre”.
It was not possible to independently verify the reports.
Much of the oil-rich Deir ez-Zor is under Isis control. Syria’s eastern desert has long played a role as a conduit for jihadis into Iraqi territories across the border, even during the American occupation.
The oil and gas fields in the province, which are a key source of income for the militant group, have been repeatedly bombed by the US-led coalition and by British warplanes when they began bombing Isis targets in Syria in December.
Deir ez-Zor city, the capital of the province, is mostly under Isis control except for a few districts still held by forces loyal to the government of Bashar al-Assad. Residents there have endured months of siege by the militants.
The offensive in Deir ez-Zor may be intended to burnish the terror group’s image in its redoubts in Syria and Iraq, having lost much territory in recent months to different forces. In Iraq, it has lost the city of Ramadi to an army-led campaign, as well as the city of Sinjar, the ancestral home of the Yazidi community, to an offensive by the Kurdish paramilitary, the peshmerga.
In northern Syria, close to the capital of their self-proclaimed caliphate in Raqqa, the militants have lost vast tracts of land to an American-backed offensive by Kurdish militias, whose forces are now just 30 miles from the city.
If confirmed, the death toll in the assault would be one of the highest in a single attack by Isis, though the jihadis have carried out mass murders before.
In 2014, its fighters killed hundreds of members of the Sunni Shaitat tribe in Deir ez-Zor province after they opposed the jihadis. In August 2014, the group massacred about 200 Syrian soldiers when it overran the Tabqa military base in Raqqa province.
The jihadis have carried out mass abductions before, seizing more than 200 civilians from central Homs province in August 2014 and at least 220 Assyrian Christians from villages in the northeast of the country months earlier.
Some of those abducted in those incidents have been freed in small batches, in some cases reportedly in exchange for ransoms.
The assault came despite a Russian air campaign targeting the group that began in September and more than a year of strikes by a US-led coalition against the jihadis in Syria.
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