Syrian state television said in a newsflash the army had now
"cleansed" the southern Hasaka district of Nashwa of Islamic State
fighters, who hold large tracts of Syria's east but mainly the more
thinly populated countryside.
Earlier on Monday a Syrian army source said Islamic State suicide
bombers blew up two trucks in the southeastern district of Ghwyran
and a fire erupted at petroleum storage tanks and a textile firm
following shelling by the militants.
State television quoted the army source as saying Islamic State had
targeted a major roundabout and an area around a mosque in Ghwyran,
among the districts entered by the insurgents in their bid to seize
government-held parts of Hasaka.
![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2015/Jun/29/images/ads/current/best_friends_sda_010515.png) The army source did not disclose details on casualties but said a
number of "martyrs fell ... Fire erupted at the (textile) plant and
a number of storage tanks," the source said, without giving further
details.
Islamic State said it had carried out suicide attacks on army
checkpoints in Ghwyran and that its fighters had advanced to new
locations in Hasaka's Aziziya district.
The Islamist insurgents have deployed scores of suicide bombers
against army checkpoints in Hasaka, enabling them to move into
positions deeper inside the city, which is close to the border with
Iraq.
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Islamic State has gone back on the offensive in Syria's civil war
after two weeks of reverses at the hands of Kurdish-led forces
supported by air strikes of a U.S.-led coalition.
Hasaka, which had a pre-war population of 300,000, is important for
all sides in the conflict as it sits between IS-held territory in
Syria and in nearby Iraq.
Hasaka has been divided into areas run separately by Syrian
President Bashar al-Assad's government and regional Kurdish
authorities, and has an ethnically and religiously mixed population
of Arabs and Kurds.
(Reporting by Suleiman Al-Khalidi and Laila Bassam; Editing by Mark
Heinrich)
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