ISIS cells and killings pose challenge for southern Syria

Residents want greater protection from the new authorities as security remains fragile

In July last year, two years after Jamila’s son Mohammed was killed, gunmen came for Tariq, another of her four sons, and her husband Abu Mohammed.

“At home, they would send people to us and every day they threatened us,” she said. “One of them came to our house ... they took Tariq, they pulled him out and shot him.”

The National has changed the names of those interviewed to protect them from possible reprisals.

Mohammed had been a brigade commander in a rebel group against the regime of Bashar Al Assad, having joined anti-government protests that were repressed as Syria spiralled down into civil war in 2011.

The association with rebel groups made the family a target for what Jamila said were extremists linked to pockets of ISIS fighters in southern Syria.

On the day Tariq and Abu Mohammed were killed last year, a warning came for her three surviving sons.

“The same day, we received a threat against Ayman, Omar and Abdulrazzaq,” she recalled. “It said, ‘We will come back and kill the rest.’”

Jamila, who is in her late 40s, is from Sanamayn in Deraa, a largely rural agricultural province in southern Syria where the 2011 protests broke out.

Like other towns in the area, it has been plagued by murders, kidnappings and other violence since former insurgents there agreed to a Russian-brokered reconciliation agreement in 2018.

That deal allowed rebels to remain in government-controlled areas of southern Syria in exchange for surrendering heavy weaponry. They co-existed, often uneasily, with the regime's security forces.

The situation also spawned cells of extremists who were intent on hunting down and killing rebels, residents said.

Al Assad government security forces' vehicles on patrol in Daraa Al Balad, southern Syria, in 2021. AFP

“After the dismantling of the [opposition] factions, we started to have active ISIS sleeper cells after 2018,” said Arif, another resident of Sanamayn.

“They existed before then, but they didn’t have any power, no one belonged to them – they were extremists with the wrong ideology.”

Home to a panoply of armed groups, former rebels and ISIS cells, Sanamayn and other towns in southern Syria have remained unstable since the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024. That highlights the major security challenges emerging from the south that face the new authorities in Damascus, led by transitional President Ahmad Al Shara.

Stopping the killings, conflicts between armed groups and achieving a monopoly on the use of force are goals that the new authorities appear to be struggling to achieve.

“Since the regime fell, we have not been joyous,” Jamila said. She described how she had kept her surviving sons hidden or sent them away from the town to protect them from threats.

She is raising two grandchildren as her own. “There was joy with the victory, joy about Ahmed Al Shara, but my God, in Sanamayn, there is no joy. There is no security for our lives, because those ISIS criminals are there.”

After the collapse of the Assad regime, Abdullah, another resident, said that ISIS-aligned groups in the town seized weapons from abandoned military bases, boosting their ability to threaten Sanamayn’s people.

Mohsen Al Haymed, a man allegedly linked to the extremists, took over control of locations that used to belong to the Syrian army’s Ninth Division in northern Sanamayn, said residents.

They repeatedly mentioned Mr Al Haymed, who was not reachable for comment, and his associates in connection with threats and assassinations in the town.

ISIS cells want to expand their influence across southern Syria, Sanamayn residents believe.

“They want to build a state starting from Sanamayn to the Yarmouth Basin to Tanf, like a triangle,” Abdullah said, describing an area from the Jordanian border to the frontier with Iraq.

“They’ve put in place that plan, but their project cannot happen. God willing, with the Syrian army, which is currently being established, they will not be able to.”

The National received photos from Sanamayn showing an ISIS flag draped over a wall, and several examples of graffiti reading, “The Islamic State is staying and expanding”, although it was not clear when the photos were taken, Arif, one of the local residents, said they were still present in the town.

Residents had been lured to the group with offers of cash payments sometimes up to tens of thousands of dollars to kill people connected to the 2011 uprising and subsequent conflict, Abdullah said, although The National could not independently verify this.

Others received smaller payments, of about $100 a month, as well as in-kind payments such as accommodation and petrol, according to residents and Mohammad Al Asakra, a human rights observer from Deraa, who is now based in Germany.

“The first thing was money, of course,” he told The National. “The second issue was their [ISIS] growth - they have wanted to control, and build a state.”

It is unclear exactly how many people in Sanamayn follow the extremist group and how many other armed men are clashing with them.

Residents described ISIS cells numbering in the low hundreds spread between towns and villages in the vicinity, while Mr Al Asakra estimated there were about 100 to 150 ISIS supporters in the town.

The current population of Sanamayn is unclear due to widespread emigration, but the town had a population of 26,000 in 2004, according to the Syrian Bureau of Statistics at the time.

Mr Al Asakra said ISIS cells in the town have connections to extremists in an eastern Syrian desert area known as Al Badiya, where there remains a centre for ISIS’s external operational planning, UN counter terrorism sources said.

Security forces last month attempted to curb violence in Sanamayn through an agreement brokered between the security forces and local armed groups, including the ISIS cells, to surrender their weapons.

With a number of people having been killed in Sanamayn, families of those victims are living in fear and want protection from Syria's new government. Matt Kynaston / The National

At the end of January, Atta Al Shami, an alleged ISIS leader in eastern rural Deraa province, was arrested by Syria’s new general security forces.

“A meeting was held with figures from Sanamayn from all the tribes, and an agreement was reached to hand over all existing weapons and put everyone under surveillance and if there is any issue, there would be an immediate response, from the operations,” Abu Murshed, deputy commander of the Southern Operations Room, a military formation in control of parts of southern Syria, told The National outside Deraa city.

But violence has persisted over the past month. At the end of January, a man named Walid Taha Al Shetar, named by local media as belonging to Mr Al Haymed’s force, died of gunshot wounds in Sanamayn.

“We are still scared, I don’t know how to tell you,” said Jamila. She and other relatives of victims last month protested in Damascus to try to assure better levels of protection for civilians in the town, but so far they feel like they have achieved little, and going public has heightened the risks to them of armed attacks.

“We had a demonstration, they started to send threats to the women,” said Jamila. “They sent a threat to my neighbour, it was bullets [at her house] straight away. These are the ISIS we have in Sanamayn - this was three days ago.”

The new Damascus-led military operations command said it carried out raids in Sanamayn and surrounding towns last month, seizing light, medium and heavy weapons and arresting what it described as “remnants of the former regime,” as well as detaining people accused of looting government military facilities, without ascribing responsibility for the thefts. It did not mention ISIS cells in the area.

Other accounts of violent clashes in the town over the past year refer less specifically to ISIS, and characterise violence as taking place between armed factions.

Abu Murshed, deputy commander of the Southern Operations Room, a military formation in control of parts of southern Syria. Matt Kynaston/ The National

Abu Murshed described past conflicts in Sanamayn as a “clan dispute” between individuals open to ISIS ideology and those opposed to it.

“In Syria, we immediately say, X person has a foreign ideology, he is ISIS,” he said. “We immediately accuse them of being ISIS, even though it’s some people and not an organised structure. It’s just individuals. The operations room immediately entered and is working on a solution.”

Abdullah acknowledged that other armed men in Sanamayn had used weapons to confront what he characterised as the ISIS cells in the town.

"We had six, seven pieces of weaponry,” he said, describing an attempt to confront the extremists. “They came in large numbers but they are cowardly […] if they know there are armed men in the district, 20-50 of them cannot enter. They just have the principle of assassinating, not confrontations.”

Observers are skeptical about the state efforts to contain the instability, especially the deal brokered last month for armed men in Sanamayn to lay down their weapons.

“The agreement is not secure, at any time there could be assassinations, or Isis could resume attacks on the new state,” said Mr Al Asakra. “The people of Sanamayn are not going to accept [Isis members] staying, there can’t just be a new page turned.”

Relatives of victims in Sanamayn say they are tired, and want more state backing to end the violence and fear plaguing their town.

“We are just asking that they [the security forces] come in and arrest them,” said Jamila. “We asked so many times, and we thought it would end when [rebel] forces came from the north [of Syria], but the tables turned within a couple of hours, they said they couldn't do anything. To this day, we are living in fear.”