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This Article is From Mar 26, 2016

Syrian Army Battles To Take Palmyra After Seizing Citadel

Syrian Army Battles To Take Palmyra After Seizing Citadel
Syrian government forces fought ISIS fighters around Palmyra as they pressed their offensive to recapture the desert city. (File Photo)
BEIRUT: Syrian government forces fought ISIS fighters around Palmyra today as they pressed their offensive to recapture the desert city from ISIS, state media and a monitoring group said.

Syrian state television said the army, which drove ISIS fighters out of the symbolic and strategic old citadel overlooking the west of the city on Friday, took full control of the northern district of Al-Amiriya.

But the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said fighting continued in that area, adding that ISIS had launched counter-attacks - including car bombings - against government forces advancing in the city.

The recapture of Palmyra, which the Islamist militants seized in May 2015, would mark the biggest reversal for ISIS in Syria since Russia's intervention turned the tide of the five-year conflict in President Bashar al-Assad's favour.

Syrian army and allied militia fighters, backed by heavy Russian and Syrian air strikes, have been fighting on the edges of the city for several days.

The Britain-based Observatory, which monitors the fighting through a network of sources within Syria, reported overnight fighting inside Palmyra in the neighbourhoods of Mutaqa'ideen and Al-Jami'iya.

Television footage from the citadel today showed a soldier waving a Syrian national flag by the medieval castle walls, while smoke rose from a central city district.

Palmyra had a population of 50,000 according to a census more than 10 years ago. Those numbers were swelled hugely by an influx of people displaced by Syria's conflict, which has raged since 2011, but most fled when ISIS took over.

Recapturing the city would open up eastern Syria, where ISIS controls most of the Euphrates Valley provinces of Deir al-Zor and Raqqa, to the army.

"Our heroic forces are continuing to advance until we liberate every inch of this pure land," a soldier told state-run television in a broadcast from slopes of the citadel, which overlooks the city's monumental Roman-era ruins.

In August, ISIS fighters dynamited two ancient buildings, the temples of Bel and Baal Shamin, which had stood as cultural landmarks in Palmyra for nearly two millennia. The United Nations described their destruction as a war crime.

Television footage broadcast in the last 24 hours from the edge of Palmyra has shown some of the city's structures and famed colonnades still standing, although the extent of any damage was impossible to assess.

Syrian officials said last year they had moved hundreds of ancient statues to safe locations before the city was overrun by ISIS.
© Thomson Reuters 2016


(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

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