At least 53 people were shot dead on Friday by members of the Islamic State (IS) jihadist group when they were collecting truffles in the province of Homs, in central Syria, the official Syrian news agency SANA reported.
All the victims died from shots to the head, while another five people who survived the action have injuries of varying degrees caused by shrapnel, Walid Ode, director of the Palmyra National Hospital, where they were transferred, told SANA.
The attackers stormed the group of collectors on the outskirts of the town of Al Sukhna, where they also set fire to their vehicles, according to one of the survivors.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an NGO based in the United Kingdom and a wide network of collaborators on the ground, confirmed the death toll in a statement and assured that seven of them were members of the Syrian Army.
Second such incident
This is the second incident involving truffle pickers in less than a week, after ISIL last Sunday kidnapped another group of 75 people in a different area of the same province.
The terrorists murdered at least 16 of them in the days after the abduction, while 25 were released and the rest remain unaccounted for five days later, according to the Observatory.
In recent years, there have been several kidnappings and armed attacks against citizens while they were collecting truffles in territories where remnants of the Islamic State are still present.
The jihadist formation was territorially defeated in the Arab country in March 2019, but it continues to maintain active cells at various points in the vast Badia desert, which provides hiding places to which they can flee after their ambushes, facilitating the survival of these groups.