Attack in eastern Syria kills 10 oil workers: state media

An attack in eastern Syria killed 10 oil field workers, state news agency SANA has reported, a day after Syrian Kurdish-led forces announced an offensive against ISIL (ISIS).

“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.

-al jazeera