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Five separate plots to assassinate Syria’s president and top ministers were foiled last year, the UN said on Wednesday in a report on Islamic State.
According to the report, the Syrian president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, was targeted twice, once in northern Aleppo and another time in southern Daraa, by Saraya Ansar al-Sunnah, an IS front group that carried out a bombing of a church in Damascus last summer.
A separate regional intelligence official also confirmed last autumn that Sharaa had faced assassination attempts, which were foiled after Syria’s security establishment was provided with intelligence from a neighbouring country on the plots.
IS has stepped up its recruitment of members since the fall of Assad in December of 2024, styling Sharaa, who used to head an Islamist rebel group, as an apostate. The group published photos of Sharaa meeting the US president, Donald Trump, as proof that he had turned towards the west and abandoned his Islamist roots.
According to the UN report, IS is focused on destabilising the new government in Damascus and is “actively exploiting security vacuums and uncertainty” in the country. It added that Sharaa was the “primary target” of IS in Syria, and that the group was operating through various front groups throughout the country for more flexibility.
IS continues to be a challenge in Iraq and Syria, with analysts saying it has regrouped in recent months, benefiting from a security vacuum and a glut of weaponry that flooded Syria after Assad’s army abandoned its posts. The UN estimates the group has 3,000 fighters across the two countries, the majority of whom are in Syria.
Damascus joined the international coalition to defeat IS in November, and recently took over a number of prisons and camps holding suspected IS fighters and their relatives in north-east Syria. Damascus now controls al-Hawl camp, where almost 25,000 relatives of suspected IS fighters reside, which analysts warn is a “ticking timebomb” for the radical group.
IS has carried out several attacks in Syria since the fall of Assad, including an attack on US and Syrian soldiers in mid-December, in which three Americans were killed and three Syrians were wounded.
