UN says 5 assassination plots on Syrian president and ministers foiled last year

According to a UN report on Islamic State, five separate plots to assassinate Syria’s president or his senior ministers were foiled last year, The Guardian writes.

According to the report, the Syrian president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, was targeted twice, once in northern Aleppo and another time in southern Daraa, by Saraya Ansar al-Sunnah, an IS front group that carried out a bombing of a church in Damascus last summer.

A separate regional intelligence official also confirmed last autumn that Sharaa had faced assassination attempts that were foiled after Syria’s security establishment was provided with intelligence from a neighboring country on the plots.

According to the UN report, IS is focused on destabilizing the new government in Damascus and is “actively exploiting security vacuums and uncertainty” in the country. It added that Sharaa was the “primary target” of IS in Syria.