“Two others have been wounded in a terrorist attack that targeted three buses transporting workers from al-Taim oil field in Deir Az Zor” province, the report said on Friday.
SANA did not provide any information on the nature of the attack or who may be behind it, but a British-based war monitor accused “cells of the Islamic State group” of carrying out the assault near the oil field.
“The attack began with explosive devices that went off as the buses drove by, and then the group’s militants shot at them,” Rami Abdel Rahman, director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told AFP.
On Thursday the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) said they had begun an offensive against Islamic State fighters, following an earlier assault on a prison in Raqqa, northwest of the attack on the bus.
The SDF said the offensive, dubbed “Operation al-Jazeera Thunderbolt”, aimed to “eliminate” IS fighters from areas that had been “the source of the recent terrorist attacks”.
The operation is being carried out alongside the US-backed coalition, although there was no immediate confirmation from the international force that they were taking part.
The SDF statement said that in addition to the thwarted Raqqa attack, IS fighters had recently carried out eight assaults in the Deir Az Zor area, Hasakeh and al-Hol camp for displaced people – predominantly family members of IS members.
Last Monday, six Kurdish fighters were killed when IS fighters attacked the complex in Raqqa, the group’s former de facto capital in Syria, in a bid to free fellow militants imprisoned there.
After a meteoric rise in Iraq and Syria in 2014, IS saw its so-called caliphate collapse, but fighters remain and the group continues to claim attacks in the two countries.Also Friday, the US-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces said their raids had reportedly thwarted an attack planned for New Year’s Eve. The IS militants were hiding in residential areas and farms, a statement from the forces said.
The years-long US-backed campaign had succeeded in crushing the militants’ territorial control in Iraq and Syria, but IS fighters maintain sleeper cells and have staged attacks that have killed scores of Iraqis and Syrians in the past months.
On Thursday, the Syrian Kurdish-led forces announced their operation, citing a surge in IS attacks and saying that “Operation Al-Jazeera Thunderbolt” aims to target sleeper cells in Al-Hol and nearby in Tal Hamis areas.
Since 2011, Syria has been mired in a bloody civil war that has drawn in regional and global powers. Syrian President Bashar Assad has mostly regained control of the country, but parts of its north remain under the control of rebels, as well as Turkish and Syrian Kurdish forces.
Also, some 900 US troops in Syria support the Kurdish-led forces’ fight against IS and have frequently targeted IS militants, mostly in parts of northeastern Syria under Kurdish control.
The US Central Command on Thursday reported conducting some 313 operations against IS in 2022 in Syria and Iraq, mostly in cooperation with Kurdish-led forces. According to a CENTCOM statement, 215 militants from the Daesh group were arrested and 466 were killed in Syria.