ISIS militants kidnapped at least 400 civilians when they attacked government-held areas in the eastern Syrian city of Deir ez-Zor on Saturday, a monitoring group said.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Sunday families of pro-government fighters were among those abducted.
“There is genuine fear for their lives, there is a fear that the group might execute them as it has done before in other areas,” said the observatory’s head Rami Abdulrahamn.
Deir ez-Zor is the main town in a province of the same name. The province links ISIS’s de facto capital in the Syrian city of Raqqa with territory controlled by the militant group in neighboring Iraq.
Syria’s state news agency SANA said earlier that at least 300 people, including women and children, had been killed during the attacks in Deir ez-Zor, but it made no mention of people getting kidnapped.
Most of those killed in day-long attacks were elderly people, women and children. The killings are some of the worst carried out by the extremist group, which controls large parts of Syria and Iraq.
Opposition activists also confirmed the killings. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which documents all sides of the Syria conflict through activists on the ground, said late Saturday that at least 135 people were killed. It said around 80 of them were soldiers and pro-government militiamen and the rest civilians.
It added that many of them were shot dead or beheaded.
ISIS has previously carried out mass killings following military assaults in Iraq and Syria, including the slaughter of 200 soldiers captured from the Tabqa airbase in Raqqa province, and hundreds of members of the Al-Sheitat tribe in Deir ez-Zor in 2014.
Residents are facing severe food shortages and sharply deteriorating conditions. Of those under siege in the city, 70 percent are women and children, and many have been displaced from their homes elsewhere and are living in temporary shelters.
Reuters
