BEIRUT: More than 100 people were killed in Syria in 24 hours of violence after Islamic State fighters attacked regime troops and a suicide bomber caused carnage at Kurdish new year celebrations, a monitor said Friday.

More than 70 members of government forces were killed when IS attacked checkpoints and other positions in the central Homs and Hama provinces, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP “most of the dead, around 50, fell in the Hama countryside.”

Several terrorists were also killed when clashes broke out, he added without giving a toll. The regime controls most of Homs and Hama.

“IS has faced setbacks recently in the provinces of Aleppo and Raqqa and in Hasakeh in confrontations with Kurds on the one hand and regime forces on the other, and are now trying to score military points, even limited ones, to offset their losses,” said Abdel Rahman.

The suicide bomber struck at Syria’s Kurdish minority on Friday, killing more than 33 people as they celebrated Kurdish new year in Hasakeh, northeast Syria.

Meanwhile, the IS has published a video purporting to show the beheading of three Kurdish peshmerga fighters in northern Iraq by militants who threatened to kill “dozens” more of those being held captive.

The six-minute clip, which appeared timed to coincide with celebrations for the Kurdish New Year, showed the peshmerga wearing orange jumpsuits being decapitated by three black-clad militants, all of whom spoke Kurdish.

“To the Muslim Kurdish people: know that our war is not with you, rather it is with those who ventured into an alliance with the Safavids and crusaders to wage war on the Muslims,” said one of the militants, using derogatory terms to refer to Iran and the coalition respectively.

Another of the militants then directly addressed Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani: “We warned you before that for every rocket you fire on those under the care of the Islamic State, you will kill one of your prisoners with your own hands.”