ISIS first began recapturing villages in central Syria in mid-2020. These regions and others like them have served as bases of operations for ISIS, enabling it to rebuild its fighting cells, train young recruits from central and northeast Syria, and stage attacks across the region. 17 massacre of truffle hunters that made international headlines, and the countryside around the abandoned village of Faydat Bin Muwaynah, west of Mayadeen. Chief among these are Wadi Doubayat, south of Sukhnah and the site of the Feb. Meanwhile, the group has also kept control of wadis and unsettled land throughout the Badia that the regime has been unable to reclaim since it first drove ISIS out of central Syria’s urban centers in 2017. The ebb and flow of the group’s five-year insurgency has resulted in recurrent, though temporary, captures of empty villages manned by pro-Damascus security forces. This is not the first time ISIS has carved out pieces of the Badia for its own. The fighting has, as of the time of this writing, ended in a stalemate, with ISIS militants retaining control of the mountains overlooking the village. The most significant of these was the recent battle for the village of al-Kawm between ISIS cells and Syrian military units led by the Russian private military company Wagner Group. While recent massacres of civilians in central Syria have refocused some international attention on the desert region, known as the Badia, the renewed widespread battles between militants and regime security forces that have occurred in parallel to these attacks have gone unnoticed. Yet it is perhaps time to reevaluate this perspective on the group and its insurgent trajectory in the country. It has been an accepted fact that ISIS ceased being a territory-controlling entity in Syria after its March 2019 defeat in the town of Baghouz.
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