Islamic fighters flee Palmyra
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SYRIAN government forces backed by Russian airstrikes drove Islamic State fighters from Palmyra yesterday, ending the group’s 10-month reign of terror over a town whose famed 2,000-year-old ruins once drew tens of thousands of visitors each year.
Syrian officials pledged to build on the win with an advance against other jihadist strongholds.
President Bashar Assad hailed the victory as an “important achievement and fresh proof of the efficiency of the Syrian army and its allies in fighting terrorism.”
The army said government forces had cleared IS fighters from the UNESCO world heritage site, where the jihadists sparked a global outcry with the systematic destruction of treasured monuments.
“Palmyra will be the central base to broaden operations against Daesh in numerous areas, primarily Deir Ezzor and Raqa,” the army said in a statement carried by state media, using an Arabic name for IS.
Backed by a barrage of Russian airstrikes, Syrian troops launched a major offensive to retake the desert city this month.
Palmyra is both a symbolic and strategic prize for Assad’s forces, as it provides control of the surrounding desert extending all the way to the Iraqi border.
A military source told reporters that IS militants had retreated towards the east as the army made its final push.
Syrian state television broadcast footage from inside Palmyra’s famed museum, showing jagged pieces of sculptures on the ground and blanketed in dust.
Most of the artifacts were evacuated by antiquities staff before IS arrived in the city last May, but larger pieces remained.
Army engineers defused roadside mines in both the modern part of the city and in the old ruins yesterday.
When IS overran Palmyra, two of the site’s treasured temples, its triumphal arch and a dozen tombs were blown up in destruction that UNESCO called a war crime.
The jihadists used Palmyra’s ancient theater as a venue for public executions and also murdered the city’s 82-year-old former antiquities chief.
The ancient artifacts left in Palmyra are in much better shape than expected, Syria’s antiquities chief said yesterday.
Maamoun Abdulkarim said much of Palmyra’s old city was intact and his department would try to restore relics that had been destroyed.
“We were expecting the worst. But the landscape, in general, is in good shape,” he said. “We could have completely lost Palmyra,” Abdulkarim said. “The joy I feel is indescribable.”
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