BEIRUT — Syrian President Bashar Assad made a rare public appearance Saturday by attending prayers for a key Muslim holiday at a mosque in the capital, Damascus, hours after the U.S.-led coalition carried out airstrikes against Islamic State group militants.
The airstrikes targeted the militants’ positions Friday night in the eastern town of Shaddadeh, a stronghold of the Islamic State group in the northeastern Syrian province of Hassakeh, according to activists.
The airstrikes caused casualties, the activists said, with one group saying as many as 30 Islamic State fighters were killed. It was the first time Shaddadeh was struck since the U.S.-led campaign began nearly two weeks ago. There was no immediate confirmation from Washington.
The United States and five Arab allies launched an aerial campaign against the Islamic State group in Syria on Sept. 23, with the aim of rolling back and ultimately crushing the extremist group, which has created a proto-state spanning the Syria-Iraq border.
The militants have also massacred captured Syrian and Iraqi troops, terrorized minorities in both countries and beheaded two American journalists and two British aid workers.
About 30 explosions were heard in and near Shaddadeh on Friday night, according to an activist in Hassakeh province, who added that the targets included several buildings occupied by Islamic State fighters.
“There were deaths for sure,” said the activist who goes by the name of Salar al-Kurdi. He spoke over Skype.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which relies on a network of activists around Syria, said as many as 30 fighters from the Islamic State group were killed in the airstrikes on Shaddadeh. It said all the dead were foreign fighters.
Meanwhile, intense fighting continued on the outskirts of Kobani on the Syrian-Turkish border, where Islamic State fighters have been trying to capture the town to open a direct link between their positions in the Syrian province of Aleppo and their stronghold of Raqqa, to the east.
Kobani and its surrounding areas have been under attack since mid-September, with militants capturing dozens of nearby Kurdish villages. The assault, which has forced about 160,000 Syrians to flee, has left the Kurdish militiamen scrambling to repel the militants’ advance into the outskirts of the town, also known in Arabic as Ayn Arab.
Meanwhile, Syrian state television aired footage of Assad praying on Saturday at the al-Numan Bin Bashir mosque in Damascus, along with government officials and the country’s Grand Mufti Ahmad Badreddine Hassoun, as most Muslims around the world started celebrating the three-day holiday of Eid al-Adha, or the Feast of Sacrifice.
