DAMASCUS, SYRIA (1:43 AM) – According to Al-Masdar News’ sources embedded in the Syrian Army’s elite Tiger Forces, the east Aleppo operation which was aimed at capturing Maskana and chasing Islamic State fighters to the provincial boundaries of Raqqa has finally concluded.
The focus of the elite force is likely to shift to Deir Ezzor now that their backs inside the Maskana plains have been secured. Sources have already suggested that the Tigers have been deploying their units across the Sheikh Hilel-Ithriya-Khanasser Highway in preparation to capture the entire desert area that spans the Ithriya-Khanasser-Resafa triangle that is the setting stage for the invasion of the Euphrates from Deir Ezzor’s western boundary.
Furthermore, the Tigers could perhaps be seen advancing south of Ithriya towards the Sha’er mountains in Homs’s eastern countryside in a bid to isolate the IS presence in eastern Hama forcing the terrorists to evacuate the rugged mountain terrain with the least cost possible. All those developments would make the anticipated offensive on the besieged Deir Ezzor much smoother- a city witnessing an increasing number of ISIS offensives in response to the SAA’s recent advances on all of Syria’s eastern fronts.
It remains unknown whether any units from the Tiger Forces would be redeployed to supplement the 5th Corps, 11th Division, and the Hezbollah units’ efforts in eastern Palmyra where the terrorist group is putting up an extremely stiff and desperate resistance west of its small oil-rich desert stronghold of Arak.
Faced with a massive PMU offensive along the Iraqi-Syrian borders south of Sinjar, a concluding Iraqi Army campaign in western Mosul, a Raqqa offensive by the US Coalition-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), and a series of Syrian government offensives spanning Syria’s eastern fronts from east Aleppo countryside all the way to east Damascus’s countryside through the eastern countrysides of Homs and Hama, the mythical Islamic State is collapsing on all fronts at a rate equivalent dwarfing their rapid expansion in 2014.
Many things are uncertain in the wild Middle East, but one uncontested certainty remains: the so-called “Islamic State in Iraq and Syria” ‘s days are numbered inside Iraq and Syria. The two countries where the earliest civilizations of the ancient Fertile Crescent cradled into history are also fated to be the graveyard of the forces that have for long opposed civilizations and the instruments of human progress. Such is the destiny of this biblical land.
