At least 40 people, mostly Syrian regime fighters, were killed on Wednesday in a series of attacks by the ISIS terrorist group in the southern city of Sweida.
"Three bombers with explosive belts targeted Sweida city alone, while the other blasts hit villages to the north and east," said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Rami Abdel Rahman, the head of the Britain-based Observatory, said the group then followed up with further attacks, seizing three of the seven villages it had targeted.
The regime and its allies hold all of Sweida province except for its northern and eastern desert regions.
Abdel Rahman said 26 pro-regime fighters had been killed and more than 30 people wounded in the attack on populated areas close to Sweida city.
At least two attackers blew themselves up in Sweida, near a marketplace and in another district, state television said.
Sweida Governor Amer al-Eshi said authorities killed two extremists before they could detonate explosive belts and arrested a third attacker. "The city of Sweida is secure and calm now," he told state-run Ikhbariyah TV.
The multiple attacks killed at least 38 civilians and wounded 37 others in the city and its countryside, the head of the Sweida health authority said.
The Observatory said regime forces battled terrorists who stormed the villages from an ISIS pocket northeast of the city.
Despite pro-regime forces ousting the group from urban centers in eastern Syria last year, surprise raids in recent months have killed dozens of regime and allied fighters.
A regime offensive recently defeated opposition factions in other parts of the southwest. The operation has focused on Daraa and Quneitra provinces.
With the help of Russian air power, the regime has been hitting ISIS in a separate pocket further west, near the frontier with the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
It is now closing in on a patch of territory in nearby Daraa held by the Jaish Khaled bin al-Walid group, which has pledged allegiance to ISIS.
The group, which has around 1,000 fighters in the region, has been the target of an intense campaign of bombing by Russian and Syrian jets in recent days.
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a group made up mostly of ex-members of the former Al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, also has a few hundred men in the south.
