DAMASCUS, Sept. 22 (Xinhua) -- The U.S.-led coalition has carried out an airdrop of forces in Syria's eastern province of Deir al-Zour, which helped in transferring a number of Islamic State (IS) militants to an unknown location, the state news agency SANA reported on Saturday.
Warplanes of the coalition made the airdrop of forces on the outskirts of the Marashdeh village in the pocket held by IS in the southeastern countryside of Deir al-Zour, said SANA.
It wasn't the first time the Syrian state media reported such an event, as the Syrian government has for long questioned the intention of the U.S.-led coalition, which entered the course of the Syrian war in 2014 on a declared purpose of defeating IS.
The coalition has been recently backing the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in their push to defeat IS in the last remaining pocket in the eastern countryside of the oil-rich province of Deir al-Zour.
The SDF unleashed a wide-scale offensive on the IS-held areas in eastern Deir al-Zour on Sept. 10, but the terror-labeled group has been relying on an interacted network of mines to hinder the progress of the Kurdish-led group amid U.S.-led airstrikes on the IS positions in that area.
On Saturday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the military showdown on the eastern bank of the Euphrates River in eastern Deir al-Zour is still ongoing.
It added that 200 fighters from both IS and SDF had been killed so far in the two-week-long showdown.
Recent reports said the IS-controlled Syrian territory has shrunk to one percent from almost half of the country a couple of years ago.
The Syrian army has cleared the IS from large swathes of areas in Deir al-Zour, while the SDF is attempting to consolidate positions in the northern and northeastern countryside of the province.
