ISIS overruns ancient site, controls half of Syrian territory, groups say

Posted 2015-05-21 11:51 by Grunt Report with 0 comments

The Islamic State terror group controls over half of Syrian territory after seizing the village and archaeological site of Palmyra in the central part of the country Thursday, activists monitoring Syria’s civil war said.

Rami Abdurrahman of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told the Associated Press the extremists overran the archaeological site, just to the southwest of the modern settlement on Palmyra, shortly after midnight local time.

An activist in the central province of Homs who goes by the name of Bebars al-Talawy also says that Islamic State, commonly known as ISIS, now controls the ruins at the UNESCO world heritage site famous for its 2,000-year-old towering Roman-era colonnades and other ruins and priceless artifacts. Before the war, thousands of tourists a year visited the remote desert outpost, a cherished landmark referred to by Syrians as the “Bride of the Desert.”

Both activists said Thursday that ISIS had not damaged the ruins so far. ISIS has previously destroyed major archaeological sites in Iraq that predate the founding of Islam. Sky News reported that hundreds of statues and artifacts had been taken to safety ahead of the ISIS advance, but larger items, such as stone tombs, could not be removed in time.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that ISIS had also seized control of Palmyra’s military air base, prison and intelligence headquarters. The Associated Press reported that the prison, known as Tadmur, is where thousands of Syrian dissidents have been imprisoned and tortured over the years.

An amateur video posted online showed ISIS fighters, allegedly inside the prison, burning a giant poster of Syrian President Bashar Assad and cheering as flames rose around them against the night sky. The video and its location could not be independently verified, but appeared genuine and corresponded to other AP reporting of the events.

Al-Talawy, the Homs activist, said the government had recently transferred thousands of detainees from the Palmyra prison to a jail near Damascus.

But he added that ISIS extremists freed some of those who were still inside by the time they captured the prison. He could not provide any definitive figures but there were believed to have been thousands of prisoners still there.

The fall of Palmyra marks the first time that ISIS has seized a population center directly from Syria’s military. The group already controlled vast, largely uninhabited tracts of land in Syria’s north and east. The country’s major population centers, such as Damascus, Homs, and Aleppo, are located in the west, near the border with Lebanon and the Mediterranean coast.

Syrian state media had earlier reported that government troops had withdrawn from the site after ensuring the safe removal of its inhabitants. Many Palmyra residents were fleeing the town toward the city of Homs and the capital, Damascus, according to Talal Barazi,

Barzai, the governor of the central province of Homs, which includes Palmyra, told The Associated Press that the Syrian army is now outside the town, from where it is targeting ISIS reinforcements.

“We have not received any news about (the archaeological site’s) destruction,” Barazi said. “We hope that there will be no massacres in the city or damage to the ruins.”

Palmyra has a population of some 65,000 people, according to Barazi. He added that 1,300 residents fled over the past days and more were trying to leave on Thursday.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.