BEIRUT: Clashes between Russia-backed Syrian regime forces and the militant Islamic State group have killed more than 40 fighters on the two sides in just 48 hours, a Britain-based war monitor said on Saturday.

Fighting and Russian air strikes in the central desert province of Homs since late Thursday have taken the lives of 18 pro-government fighters and 26 jihadists, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

“The fighting started in the night of Thursday to Friday with a jihadist assault on regime positions” near the town of Al-Sukhna, Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said.

IS jihadists have retained a roving presence in Syria’s vast Badia desert, despite losing their last shred of territory last year. They regularly carry out attacks there.

IS declared a cross-border “caliphate” in large parts of Syria and neighbouring Iraq in 2014, but several military campaigns against it chipped away at that proto-state and eventually led to its territorial demise.

Syria’s war has killed more than 380,000 people since it started in 2011 with the repression of anti-government protests, before evolving into a complex conflict involving world powers and jihadists.Meanwhile, the wife of a self-described aid worker stripped of his British nationality has called for his release after he was detained by jihadists in Syria’s last major rebel bastion.

Tauqir Sharif, 33, was detained on June 22 by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a dominant group in Syria’s northwestern region of Idlib, his supporters say.

“We haven’t been given anything from HTS to even say what the allegations are” against him, his wife Racquell Hayden Best said in the town of Atme, adding that she had been scrambling for information on his detention.

“We have heard ourselves that he is innocent. If he is an innocent man, why are you holding him in prison?” she asked.

Sharif, whose father is originally from Pakistan, hails from Chingford on the eastern outskirts of London and first arrived in Syria in 2012, according to the Live Updates From Syria organisation he founded with his wife.

Britain stripped him of his British nationality in 2017, accusing him of links to an Al Qaeda-aligned group it did not specify, the British press has said, but Sharif has denied the allegation.

HTS has not commented on Sharif’s detention, which comes at a time of heightened tensions between the group and other fighters in the Idlib region.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor, said Sharif was detained over his alleged ties with rival jihadists.

A fragile ceasefire has since March stemmed a Russia-backed regime offensive against Idlib.

The region is home to some three million people, a large proportion of whom have been displaced from their homes by Syria’s nine-year-old war and are dependent on humanitarian aid.

Published in Dawn, July 5th, 2020