Daesh frees six Syria Druze women, children after three-month ordeal

BEIRUT — The Daesh group has released two women and four children among 27 surviving Druze hostages it seized during a deadly July attack on the minority community's heartland in southern Syria.

State television broadcast footage of the six arriving in the city of Sweida on Saturday, joyful at being reunited with their families but haggard after their three-month ordeal.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group, said their release was the first part of a deal that would see at least 60 Daesh prisoners released in exchange and a $27 million ransom paid.

The extremists abducted around 30 people — mostly women and children — from Sweida province in late July during the deadliest attack on Syria's Druze community of the seven-year civil war.

As negotiations for their release dragged on, families led a series of protests outside government offices in Sweida to demand more be done.

"I cannot describe my joy," Rasmia Abu Amar told state television after being reunited with her husband.

"But it is incomplete — my son has not yet been released," she said, her hair covered by a white headscarf.

A second woman appeared with her four children, their clothes still dirty from their long captivity and her sons with their heads shaved.

Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP that the six were freed on Friday night and that further hostage releases were expected "in the next few days or hours".

Stiff price

He said that in return for the release of all of the hostages, the Syrian government had agreed to free 60 Daesh group prisoners and pay a ransom of $27 million.

"Nine Daesh women prisoners held by the regime have already been handed over to the group along with seven children," Abdel Rahman said.

During the coordinated assaults on July 25, Daesh carried out suicide bombings, shootings and stabbings that left more than 250 people dead, most of them civilians.

Sweida province is the heartland of the country's Druze minority, which made up around 3 per cent of Syria's pre-war population — or around 700,000 people.

Followers of a secretive offshoot of Islam, the Druze are considered heretics by the Sunni extremists of Daesh.

The extremists executed a 19-year-old male student among the hostages in August and then a 25-year-old woman in early October. Daesh said a 65-year-old woman being held by the group also died from illness.

Negotiations between regime ally Russia and the extremists for the release of the hostages had stalled. But the latest round of talks appeared to have paid off — albeit it with a stiff price.

The observatory said Daesh had also demanded the halting of an offensive against them in Sweida.

 Extremists killed

Government forces have battled its fighters in the volcanic plateau of Tulul Al Safa in the east of the province since the July attack.

Abdel Rahman said the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a Kurdish-led alliance that controls swathes of the north and northeast with the support of a US-led coalition, "should also release some Daesh detainees" but he did not specify the number.

There was no immediate comment from the SDF, which has been taking heavy casualties fighting Daesh in its last pocket of control in eastern Syria, around the Euphrates valley town of Hajin.

On September 10, the group launched a major assault on the pocket where they estimate some 3,000 extremists are holed up.

The battle has killed 414 extremists and 227 SDF fighters in total since then, the observatory says.

On Saturday, coalition air strikes killed 28 Daesh fighters in and around Hajin, while another seven extremists were killed in clashes with the SDF, the monitor said.

Coalition air strikes on Daesh targets in another part of the eastern pocket killed at least 41 civilians, 10 of them children, on Thursday and Friday, it added.

A coalition spokesman was not immediately available for comment.

Syria's grinding civil war has claimed more than 360,000 lives since it erupted with the the bloody repression of anti-government protests in 2011.

A caliphate which the extremists proclaimed across large swathes of Syria and neighbouring Iraq in 2014 has crumbled in the face of multiple offensives against them but they remain a potent force.