In Reply to: Man arrested for playing Darth Vadar music posted by mh on October 23, 2025 at 09:11:33
The two American-backed Kurdish soldiers were riding in a pickup truck past a row of shops when Islamic State militants on motorcycles opened fire with AK-47s, killing them both.
A shop owner near the site said it was the first Islamic State attack on the road. “We are all afraid,” he said, visibly shaken a day after the ambush. “They have returned to our city.”
The soldiers were with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, which fought with the U.S. to bring down an Islamic State empire in Syria and Iraq that at its peak ruled millions of people and pulled in hundreds of millions of dollars a year in extortion and taxes.
Six years later, that rare, decisive victory over militancy is being eroded. Islamic State, now a decentralized mobile insurgency, is exploiting a reduced American presence and the collapse of Bashar-al Assad’s regime in Syria to enlist new recruits and widen its reach, said U.S. and Kurdish military commanders.
The group is freshly equipped after raiding arms depots late last year after rebels took Damascus and the regime’s army and its Iranian allies fled. It isn’t able to hold territory, but it is contributing to a sense of lawlessness that’s adding to the stress on the new state.
Islamic State militants staged 117 attacks in northeast Syria through the end of August, far outpacing the 73 attacks in all of 2024, according to SDF figures. They have also plotted attacks in the capital, 270 miles away from their bases of operation in the east, Syria’s government said.