Alva Review-Courier -

DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) — Islamic State fighters ambushed a city and several villages in southern Syria on Wednesday, triggering ferocious clashes between residents and the militants that provincial health officials said killed more than 200 people.

The coordinated attacks across the province of Sweida, which included several suicide bombings, shattered the calm of a region that has been largely insulated from the worst of the violence of Syria's seven year long civil war.

The suicide bomb blasts inside the provincial capital, also called Sweida, were apparently timed to coincide with attacks on...