AFP, Moscow :
Russia’s defence minister said Saturday that almost 88,000 rebels had been killed in Syria in the three years since Moscow’s intervention to back government forces.
“Over the course of the operation, a total of more than 87,500 rebels have been eliminated, 1,411 settlements have been liberated and more than 95 percent of Syria’s territory,” Shoigu was quoted as saying at a forum in Singapore in a ministry statement.
“Most of the rebels have been liquidated,” Shoigu said.
Britain-based war monitor the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says close to 365,000 people have been killed during the seven-year civil war.
Russia launched strikes in support of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime in September 2015.
Russian air forces have carried out more than 40,000 bombing missions, hitting about 120,000 targets of “terrorist” infrastructure, Shoigu said.
The defence minister said that “Syrian armed forces currently control territory where more than 90 percent of the population lives.”
Meanwhile, the Islamic State group has released six of 27 Druze hostages it seized during a deadly July attack in Syria’s Sweida province in exchange for a prisoner swap and ransom, a monitor said Saturday.
“Two women and four children from the province of Sweida were released last night,” Rami Abdel Rahman, director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitor group, told AFP.
He added that the releases were the “first wave” and part of an agreement sealed with the Syrian government to exchange all the hostages for “60 Islamic State prisoners held by the regime and a ransom of $27 million.”
The jihadist group abducted around 30 people – mostly women and children -from Sweida in late July during the deadliest attack on Syria’s Druze community of the seven-year civil war.
During the coordinated assaults on July 25, IS waged a series of suicide bombings, shootings and stabbings that left more than 250 people dead across the southwestern province, most of them civilians.
Sweida province is the heartland of the country’s Druze minority, which made up around three percent of Syria’s pre-war population – or around 700,000 people.
IS executed a 19-year-old male student among the captives in August and then a 25-year-old female captive in early October. The group said a 65-year-old female captive also died from illness.
Families of those kidnapped held protests to demand action by the Syrian government to free them.
Negotiations between the government’s Russian ally and the jihadists for the release of the captives had stalled.
