…As IS car bombing kills dozens of displaced in Syria: monitor***
The bodies of 26 female migrants who apparently drowned have arrived at the Italian port of Salerno as rescues intensify on the Mediterranean Sea, the U.N. refugee agency said.
The bodies were transferred to the Italian mainland aboard a Spanish naval ship carrying another 400 migrants rescued during four operations in the central Mediterranean.
Twenty-three of the dead women were on a rubber dinghy that sank off Libya two days ago, Marco Rotunno, a spokesman in Italy for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees spokesman, said. Another 60 people were pulled to safety, but more may have perished at sea, Rotunno said.
Humanitarian groups say some 2,500 migrants were picked up at sea over the last four or five days, making it the most intense period for rescues on the Mediterranean since Italy reached a deal with Libya this summer to slow departures of smugglers’ boats carrying migrants. In the same short and recent period, 37 bodies have been recovered, the Italian news agency ANSA said.
The number of migrants arriving in Italy so far this year is 30 percent lower than last year, 111,716 through Friday compared to nearly 160,000 in the same period of 2016, according to Interior Ministry figures.
The U.N.’s International Organization for Migration put the number of dead in the center Mediterranean route from Libya to Italy at over 2,600 through Nov. 1.
In the meantime, a car bombing carried out by the Islamic State group killed dozens of displaced people in the eastern Syrian province of Deir Ezzor on Saturday, a monitor said.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the attack targeted people displaced by fighting in the oil-rich province who had gathered on the eastern bank of the Euphrates River, adding that dozens more were wounded.
The attack comes as Syrian and allied forces converged Saturday on holdout IS fighters in the border town of Albu Kamal, a day after Russian-backed regime forces took full control of the provincial capital, also called Deir Ezzor, which was the last Syrian city where IS still had a presence.
“The Islamic State group targeted with a car bomb displaced people on the eastern bank of the Euphrates River, killing dozens and wounding dozens of others,” Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said.
He said he could not immediately gave a specific toll of how many people were killed and wounded in the attack.
Abdel Rahman said the victims had fled battlegrounds in Deir Ezzor province, where the US-backed Kurdish-Arab Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) alliance is also on the offensive against IS.
The SDF is attacking IS on the eastern bank of the Euphrates which cuts across the province, while Russian-backed Syrian forces are battling the jihadists on the western bank of the river.
The parallel offensives have sent thousands of civilians fleeing for their lives, some straight into the desert.
Sonia Khush, Syria director at the Save the Children charity, said an estimated 350,000 people have fled the recent fighting in Deir Ezzor province, half of them children.
“The situation in the city, and surrounding countryside, has been especially bleak with civilians trapped between the fighting and all too often caught in the crossfire,” she said
The Euphrates Valley border area was the heart of the “caliphate” IS proclaimed in 2014 and is now its last redoubt, where a US-led coalition supporting the military effort said around 1,500 jihadist fighters remained.
Despite being driven out from large parts of Deir Ezzor, IS still controls 37 percent of the province and its fighters are deployed in the eastern side.
ABC with additional report from MSN
