ISIS/ISIS terrorists have captured a key city southwest of Homs province in Syria on Sunday as fighting rages in a nearby town inhabited by Christians, Reuters reported.
The report said the Islamic extremists captured the key Syrian town of Maheen in southwest Homs, bringing the ISIS/ISIL terrorists within 20 kilometers (13 miles) of the main highway that links Damascus with Homs and cities further north.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the Islamic State began their assault on the city on Saturday night against government forces in the area, using two suicide car bombs and gained control of Maheen by Sunday morning.
At least 50 government troops loyal to the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad were killed or wounded during the attack. Reports have indicated that by Saturday afternoon, fierce fighting is still raging on the outskirts of Saddad, further west of Maheen. Islamic State jihadists are pushing their campaign into Saddad, a nearby town mostly inhabited by Christians.
After the capture, the Islamic State issued a statement confirming they were responsible for the assault and described Saddad as "strategically important" for their campaign to topple al-Assad's regime. The group also claimed to have seized an undetermined amount of weapons caches from the retreating government forces.
The ISIS/ISIL extremists have effectively established their stronghold in the north and eastern part of Syria but has been trying to increase its occupied territories in Homs province following their capture of the historic city of Palmyra earlier this year, and then Qaryatain, 15 kilometers east of Maheen.
Earlier, it was reported that ISIS/ISIL terrorist group has unleashed its death squad to hunt down and murder Christian refugees in Syrian refugee camps, reported Breaking News Israel. The death squad is the latest horrific tactic employed by the Muslim radicals to eliminate Christians in the region and establish a conservative Muslim society.
The report was quoting a forming former Islamic State jihadi who claimed that he was sent to one of the refugee camps to carry out the mission of wiping out the country of Christians by murdering them but changed his mind and eventually left the group.
Indeed, the tactic employed by the ISIS/ISIL terrorist group was so horrible that witnesses are so scared to come out to report the atrocities being committed. In an interview, one aid worker told the Sunday Express, "They're like a mafia. People are even killed inside the camps, and the refugees are afraid to say if they saw somebody get killed. If you ask them, they'll say, 'I don't know, I was asleep.' "
A separate report by The Clarion Project claimed that the jihadi death squads is also kidnapping Christian girls and selling them as sex slaves.
The aid worker said, "The camps are dangerous because they have ISIS as well as Iraqi and Syrian militias. It's another place for gangs. They're killing inside the camps, and they're buying and selling women and even girls."
