Syria says it has foiled an ISIS sabotage plot in Damascus with the help of Turkish spies.
Three men were arrested and a "highly professional" car bomb discovered in the capital during raids, authorities said. They said a cell affiliated with ISIS was behind the plot.
ISIS last month declared a new campaign against the Syrian state. The announcement heightened security fears after a series of prison escapes during clashes in north-east Syria.
With US forces withdrawing from bases, and Kurdish-led forces giving up control of ISIS prisons, all eyes are on whether the Syrian government can keep the extremists at bay. President Ahmad Al Shara is a former militant who turned against ISIS and Al Qaeda before overthrowing the regime of Bashar Al Assad in 2024.
Hans-Jakob Schindler, a former UN Security Council co-ordinator for monitoring ISIS and Al Qaeda, said ISIS has sensed that "this is our opportunity to come back". He said the group's willingness to declare a "new phase" of operations hinted at a boost to manpower after the prison escapes and a push to recruit from Mr Al Shara's ranks.
ISIS understands that Mr Al Shara "is an opponent, but he's not the same kind of opponent as the US would be or even as Assad would have been, against ISIS", he told The National. "Maybe he believes what he says about inclusion and democracy. The people underneath him just don't."
In the Damascus raid, Syria's Interior Ministry said its forces acted "in close co-ordination with the Turkish Intelligence Service". Turkey, which has interests in subduing Kurdish militancy in north-east Syria, is a major backer of Mr Al Shara's government.
An ISIS announcement in late February described Mr Al Shara's government as illegitimate because of its links with Turkey and the US. Abu Hudhayfah Al Ansari, an ISIS spokesman, called Mr Al Shara “a new despot” whose fate “will not be better” than that of Mr Al Assad.
The three suspects in the latest raid were identified as Omar Hashem, Mohammed Hamad and Hussein Khalf. The ministry said its engineers dealt with a car bomb parked at a "sensitive site". The car was "rigged for remote detonation with the utmost professionalism" and loaded with TNT and C4 explosives, it said.
ISIS lost its last patch of territory in Syria in 2019, but maintains cells that carry out attacks. The Syrian state and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces blamed each other for recent security lapses around camps such as Al Hol that were linked to ISIS.
Weeks of clashes ended in an agreement for the Syrian government to take control of large areas of formerly SDF-held territory, including the prison camps, in exchange for some concessions to the Kurds. The US, meanwhile, withdrew troops from the Al Tanf and Shaddadi bases.
The small remaining US presence will affect its ability to collect intelligence, Mr Schindler said. "It is different from having multiple camps, locations at the Iraqi-Syrian border, where you can then run informant networks out of it or do electronic surveillance."
"We have a partially reliable counter-terrorism partner in the new government, that is still under security pressure because this agreement with the Kurds is quite tenuous," he said. He added that, with Israel and Iran also interfering in Syria's affairs, "these are the perfect conditions for any terror organisations to grow, and ISIS has very much made clear that they are willing to grow".
