Jihadist fighters captured a major military air base in northeastern Syria on Sunday, removing the last government-held post in a province the extremists claim as part of their new “Islamic State.”
The storming of Tabqa air field, a major government military facility containing several squadrons of planes, helicopters, tanks and artillery, is a significant victory for the Islamic State of the Iraq and the Levant (ISIS).
“Some of the Syrian regime troops pulled out, and now the Islamic State is in full control of Tabqa,” said Rami Abdurrahman of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. “This makes Raqqa province the first to fully fall out of government hands.”
At least 500 fighters from both sides were reported to have died in the fighting over recent days, with casualties among ISIS forces said to be running twice as high as among the government troops.
There were reports of celebratory gunfire in Raqqa, ISIS’s central stronghold in Syria, after mosques announced through their loudspeakers that the base had fallen to the Islamists. A witness told the Reuters news agency that fighters displayed the severed heads of Syrian army soldiers in the city square.
The jihadists, who have grown in strength and numbers throughout Syria’s continuing civil war against the regime of Bashar al-Assad, are now unchallenged in the north east of the country.
Their control has given them access to the regions plentiful oil resources, from which they generate an estimated monthly income of more than $20 million – enabling them also to sweep into neighbouring Iraq.
Located just 40 kilometres from Raqqa, Tabqa military base had been besieged for several weeks, forcing the Syrian regime to supply its trapped soldiers by parachute.
In recent days however, ISIS stepped up its campaign, dispatching suicide bombers to breach the base’s outer wall – including, according to its social media accounts on Friday, Sufian al Omar, a 14-year-old boy who it claimed had joined his father in a “suicide operation” at Tabqa.
Despite government air strikes to try to beat back the attack, the jihadis quashed the remaining pockets of resistance on Sunday and entered the base, killing dozens of soldiers and capturing others.
Capture of the base will allow ISIS to concentrate more its efforts on Iraq, where it’s steady advance has brought it within miles of Iraqi capital.
Mohammed Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister arrived in Baghdad on Sunday for two days of talks on how to manage the militant threat.
Mr. Zarif said his country would not send troops to Iraq as its own soldiers were “quite capable” of defending territory. The Iraqi armed forces in the north of the country collapsed in the face of the ISIS advance in June, retreating in many cases without firing a single shot.
Instead, Iran has been funding several Shia militias in Iraq, including the powerful Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq.
The militias are better fighters, but they have also fuelled the sectarian undercurrent in Iraq that has assisted ISIS’s advance by turning members of the rical Sunni sect against the Baghdad government.
Locals fear a return to the bloody days of 2006, when almost every Iraqi lost a relative in the fighting between Sunnis and Shia.
A car bomb tore through the crowded Shia district of Shula, killing eight people. As the sectarian enmity grows, such attacks have become a near daily occurrence.
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