Reuters, Beirut :
Fighters from al Qaeda offshoot Islamic State killed at least 50 Syrian army soldiers and took over parts of their base on Friday outside the northern city of Raqqa, as the radicals escalated their attacks on government forces, a monitoring group said.
Fighters from the ultra-hardline group captured and killed at least 50 members of the army’s 17th Division after ambushing them outside Raqqa when they withdrew from the area where they were based, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Raqqa is already a stronghold of Islamic State, which has advanced in Syria and taken over swaths of territory in neighboring Iraq in what it has described as a bid to establish an Islamic caliphate.
Since its lightning advance in Iraq last month, the group has confronted government forces in Syria more frequently whilst continuing to attack rival rebel groups fighting to oust President Bashar al-Assad.
Raqqa is the only Syrian provincial capital to have fallen completely outside Assad’s control and Islamic State has paraded military hardware through its streets.
A Twitter account linked to Islamic State also published pictures of the beheaded corpses and heads of five soldiers killed in Raqqa province, saying they belonged to the 17th division.
A separate video posted online on Friday appeared to show an Islamic State fighter filming himself entering an abandoned part of the base and tearing down images of Assad and Syrian flags.
