The fighters are currently in quarantine in a hospital in the city of Mayadeen in the eastern Syrian province of Deir ez-Zor, the Kurdish Syrian ARA news reported.

“Most of those infected are foreign militants who had sexual intercourse with two Moroccan women. The women passed on the disease to the militants before their infection was revealed. We were ordered by the group’s local leadership to transfer the infected militants to a quarantine center in the city,” the agency cited a local Syrian doctor as saying.

The doctor said the two women escaped to Turkey fearing they would be executed for giving the disease to IS fighters.

The leaders of the group ordered screen tests for AIDS for their troops in the province and are planning to get rid of those who are infected, the report said.

“IS leadership is planning to assign suicide attacks for its militants who are tested positive with AIDS,” a civil rights activist in al-Mayadeen told the agency.

The report said a similar outbreak of AIDS happened in the IS-controlled city of Shaddadi in Hasakah province in the spring, after an Indonesian fighter passed the disease to a sex slave who was later sold on. The man, who also donated blood for transfusion, was reportedly executed in June.

Islamic State is a radical Islamist group that has announced a caliphate straddling Iraq and Syria. The US is leading a coalition of nations in a bombing campaign designed to weaken IS and allow allied troops on the ground to destroy them, but so far the effort has had limited success.