Archeologists were rushing to the ancient city of Palmyra yesterday to assess the damage wreaked by the Islamic State (IS) group, after it was ousted by the Syrian army in a bloody battle.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad hailed the victory as “important” as Damascus reportedly dispatched experts to check the damage wreaked by the extremists on the UNESCO world heritage site.
A correspondent inside Palmyra said some monuments, including the iconic Temple of Bel, lay in pieces almost one year after the group seized the site, but much of the ancient city was intact.
Residential neighborhoods in the adjacent modern town, where 70,000 people lived before the war, were deserted and damage there was widespread, the correspondent said.
Syrian soldiers, pro-government militiamen and Russian fighters strolled among the ruins in awe after seizing the city on Sunday, while regime troops kicked around a football in the middle of a street.
The Islamic State group sparked a global outcry when it started destroying Palmyra’s treasured monuments, which it considers idolatrous, after taking the city in May last year.
Syria’s antiquities chief said the priceless artifacts had survived better than feared from a campaign of destruction UNESCO described as a “war crime.”
“We were expecting the worst, but the landscape, in general, is in good shape,” Maamoun Abdulkarim said in Damascus. “We could have completely lost Palmyra... The joy I feel is indescribable.”
Historian of the ancient world Maurice Sartre told reporters that Abdulkarim was already on his way from Damascus to begin a survey of the ruins.
“One mustn’t forget that only around 15 to 20 percent of Palmyra had actually been excavated, and so there was an enormous amount yet to discover,” he said. “All the tombs we hadn’t excavated and have now been totally pillaged are lost to science forever.”
The Islamic State group had used Palmyra’s ancient theater as a venue for public executions and also murdered the city’s 82-year-old former antiquities chief.
The Syrian army said the city would now serve as a base to “broaden operations” against the Islamic State group, including in its stronghold of Raqa and Deir Ezzor further east.
At least 400 Islamic State fighters were killed in the battle for the city, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. On the government side, 188 troops and militiamen were killed.
“That’s the heaviest losses that IS has sustained in a single battle since its creation” in 2013, the director of the Britain-based monitoring group, Rami Abdel Rahman, told reporters.
The ancient city, northeast of Damascus, drew about 150,000 tourists per year before Syria’s civil war and is known to Syrians as the “Pearl of the Desert.”
Syrian state television broadcast footage from inside Palmyra’s famed museum, showing jagged pieces of sculptures on the ground and blanketed in dust.
The Islamic State group is under growing pressure from Syrian and Iraqi forces determined to retake bastions of its self-proclaimed “caliphate.”
On Thursday, the Iraqi army announced the launch of an offensive to eventually recapture Iraq’s second city of Mosul, held by the extremists since June 2014.
Russian forces, which intervened in support of longtime ally al-Assad in September last year, were heavily involved in the Palmyra offensive despite a major drawdown last week.
Russian warplanes carried out 40 combat sorties around Palmyra from Sunday to yesterday, striking 117 “terrorist targets” and killing 80 Islamic State fighters, the Russian Ministry of Defense said on Sunday.
Russian President Vladimir Putin telephoned al-Assad to congratulate him, adding that “successes such as the liberation of Palmyra would be impossible without Russia’s support,” a Kremlin spokesman said.
Al-Assad said the victory was “fresh proof of the efficiency of the Syrian army and its allies in fighting terrorism.”
The Islamic State group and rival extremist group the al-Qaeda-affiliate al-Nusra Front, are not party to a ceasefire in force across Syria since Feb. 27.
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