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Assad hails Syrian regime's capture of Palmyra from Isis Assad hails Syrian regime's capture of Palmyra from Isis
(about 2 hours later)
Islamic State fighters have withdrawn from Palmyra in a defeat hailed by the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, as a success for his government forces and allies. The Syrian and Russian governments have hailed their recapture of the ancient oasis city of Palmyra from Islamic State, ending a 10-month ordeal that saw the destruction of some of the historic site’s most famed monuments.
The Isis retreat came after an assault from Syrian government forces backed by Russian airstrikes, Syrian state media and activist monitoring groups said on Sunday. The battle for the city is the latest in a string of defeats for Isis, now in retreat across Syria and Iraq, where it once controlled vast tracts of territory: nearly half of Syria and the desert plains of Nineveh and most of Anbar in Iraq.
“The liberation of the historic city of Palmyra today is an important achievement and another indication of the success of the strategy pursued by the Syrian army and its allies in the war against terrorism,” state television quoted Assad as telling a visiting French delegation.
The Russian president, Vladimir Putin congratulated Assad on the victory, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the Tass news agency, adding: “Assad highly valued the help Russian air forces have provided and underlined that such successes as regaining Palmyra would have been impossible without Russia’s support.”
The capture of the modern city and its celebrated ancient ruins follows a three-week campaign and strategically leaves exposed the approaches to the Isis heartlands of Deir ez-Zor and Raqqa to the east, to where many fighters retreated.
Isis has come under mounting pressure on several fronts in Iraq and Syria in recent months.
Syrian television quoted a military source saying the army and its militia allies took “complete control over the city of Palmyra”. A state TV reporter spoke live from inside Palmyra, showing troops in the centre and some of the nearby buildings reduced to rubble.
Related: Restoring Syria's pearl of the desert: a reason for optimism amid the storm of terror
The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said there was still gunfire in the eastern part of the city on Sunday morning but the bulk of the Isis force had retreated.
The SOHR’s director, Rami Abdulrahman, said 400 Isis fighters died in the battle, which he described as the biggest single defeat for the group since it declared a caliphate in areas of Syria and Iraq under its control in 2014.
Moscow announced earlier this month that it would begin drawing down its forces in Syria but would continue to target Isis and other extremist groups. Russia’s defence minister said on Saturday that Russian jets had carried out 40 air sorties near Palmyra in a 24-hour period, hitting 158 targets and killing more than 100 militants.
Isis drove Syrian government forces from Palmyra in a matter of days last May and later demolished some of the best-known monuments in the Unesco world heritage site, including two large temples dating back more than 1,800 years and a Roman triumphal archway.
Isis also demolished Palmyra’s infamous Tadmur prison, where thousands of government opponents were reportedly tortured.
The Syrian culture minister, Issam Khalil, hailed the recapture of Palmyra as a “victory for humanity and right over all projects of darkness”.
As Syria’s top archaeologist prepared to see how much of the ancient city survived or could be salvaged, he vowed that Palmyra’s famous temples would rise again from the desert sands.
“We will not leave the temples destroyed,” Maamoun Abdelkarim, Syria’s director of antiquities, said.
Related: ‘Palmyra will rise again. We have to send a message to terrorists’Related: ‘Palmyra will rise again. We have to send a message to terrorists’
“We have to send a message against terrorism that we are united in protecting our heritage. We will never accept that the children of Syria and the world visit the site of Baalshamin and Bel and the victory arch while they are lying in ruins on the ground. We will rebuild them.” Palmyra’s reclamation by Assad’s army, after weeks of intense combat, was aided by some of the heaviest Russian airstrikes since Moscow launched its military intervention last autumn. It is also a significant morale boost for the embattled Syrian strongman as well as the Kremlin.
Isis blew up many of the city’s most revered buildings and murdered 82-year-old Khaled al-Asaad, the senior scholar who had preserved and studied the city all his life, when they swept into Palmyra last May. The videotaped destruction caused archaeologists around the world to despair. “The liberation of the historic city of Tadmur (Palmyra) today is an important achievement and is evidence of the efficacy of the strategy adopted by the Syrian army and its allies in the war on terrorism,” Assad told a French delegation in Damascus.
Advancing soldiers had been issued with warnings to watch out for booby-traps that could cause more damage to the site, Abdelkarim said, and archaeologists would follow in their wake to start the painstaking work of reconstructing the buildings from the rubble. A televised statement by the Syrian military said it had established full control over Palmyra, which was conquered by Isis last May. “We have restored security and stability to the city of Palmyra, and established full control on the surrounding, commanding hills,” the Syrian military said in its statement.
“We will assess how much damage the stones suffered and we will re-use them in order to scientifically put back the temples,” Abdelkarim said in a phone interview from Damascus, promising a blueprint for reconstruction by next month. “We have the plans and the images and we will rebuild the missing portions until the temples of Bel and Baalshamin are rebuilt.” State TV said troops were working on clearing mines from the town and its monuments, where numerous booby traps were laid down by the militants before their retreat.
Kevin Butcher, professor of classics and ancient history at the University of Warwick, said restoration did appear possible. “Close-up images of the temple of Baalshamin after its destruction show that many of the individual blocks of stone remain. Many other ancient structures in the region have been restored from fragments, so that it’s perfectly possible for some kind of restoration to be achieved.” The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, congratulated Assad on the victory, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was quoted as saying on Sunday. “Assad highly valued the help Russian air forces have provided and underlined that such successes as regaining Palmyra would have been impossible without Russia’s support,” he told the Tass news agency.
Drone footage released by a Russian television station showed collapsed archaeological structures in the sprawling Greco-Roman old city but with the amphitheatre largely intact. Russia has long insisted that it sought to fight terrorist groups through its intervention in Syria, when in reality its attacks have predominantly targeted mainstream opposition groups battling to overthrow the Syrian president.
But the victory in Palmyra is likely to boost the Kremlin’s campaign, which has always portrayed the Syrian leader, whose violent response to protests sparked the creation of an armed opposition, as an effective force in fighting terrorism.
“Our army, in cooperation with its friends, is the only effective force able to fight and eliminate terrorism,” the Syrian military said in its statement after securing Palmyra.
The fall of the city to Isis gained worldwide attention as it hosts some of the most well-preserved ruins of antiquity. Isis destroyed the iconic temples of Bel and Baalshamin as well as the Arch of Triumph, looting graves and using the amphitheatre to stage executions.
Palmyra’s contemporary strategic importance lies in its location in central Syria; while under Isis’s control, it was a gateway to threaten the more densely populated government-held provinces to the west, including Homs and Damascus.
Its recapture means Assad’s forces can use Palmyra as a stepping stone for offensives against Isis-held territory in Syria’s eastern desert, where the militants are entrenched in Deir ez-Zor, as well as the self-proclaimed caliphate’s de facto capital in Raqqa.
The Syrian military said it would use Palmyra as the staging ground for just such a campaign, but it remains to be seen whether it has the manpower to attempt such a large-scale effort, debilitated as it is by five years of civil conflict.
The defeat is a remarkable turn of fortunes for Isis, which has seen its territory in Syria and Iraq recede under disparate offensives throughout the two collapsing nation-states. The group has turned instead to attacks abroad to bolster its faltering morale.
Less than a year ago, in May 2015, the group had conquered Palmyra and Ramadi west of Baghdad, and established control over approximately half of Syria’s landmass.
But last November it lost Sinjar, the ancestral homeland of the Yazidi community, to a US-backed Kurdish offensive. Ramadi was liberated by Iraqi counter-terrorism troops, and the group has continued to lose territory in northern Syria, including its strategic hub in the town of Shaddadi, to Kurdish forces.
Iraq is also laying the groundwork for an offensive on the city of Mosul, the largest city under Isis control.
In an article for the Guardian, Syria’s director of antiquities, Maamoun Abdelkarim, said a team of archaeologists would go to Palmyra in the coming days to assess the damage to its monuments, and pledged to rebuild the destroyed temples and arch.
“We will issue a challenge to international terrorism, that no matter what you do you cannot erase our history, and we will not sit idle and weep over the ruins,” he said.