Syria says IS group killed 300 in attacks in country’s east

Islamic State group militants militants killed at least 75 people execution style in attacks on government-held areas in Syria’s city of Deir al-Zor on Saturday, a source and a monitoring said.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said IS had killed at least 135 people in the multi-front attack that began on Saturday.

Two people walk through a destroyed neighborhood in Deir Ezzor.

The kills are just about the unsoundest executed by the radical grouping, which commands a big parcel of Syria and Iraq.

The regime still controls parts of the provincial capital and a nearby military airport despite repeated attacks from Isis.

If confirmed it would be one of the highest tolls for a single day in Syria’s almost five-year war.

Syria’s state news agency SANA, quoting residents, said “around 300 civilians” were killed in the onslaught.

A Syrian source said the group “committed a massacre among the civilians”.

“Severe cases of malnutrition are reported by health personnel particularly amongst children with unverified reports of 15 – 20 people dying from starvation in 2015 (of whom four were children)”, it said.

Opposition activists said numerous victims were Syrian soldiers and pro-government militiamen and their families.

Russian warplanes carried out air strikes in support of regime fighters on Al-Baghaliyeh overnight, it said.

The jihadis have also 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.

The regime has advanced towards the town, an Daesh bastion, in recent days, and is now within 10 kilometres (six miles) of it, said the Observatory. Many have been forced from their homes and are living in temporary shelters.