Archaeologists were rushing to the ancient city of Palmyra on Monday to assess the damage wreaked by the Islamic State group, after it was ousted by the Syrian army in a bloody battle.<\/p>\n
President Bashar al-Assad hailed the victory as \"important\" as Damascus reportedly dispatched experts to check the damage wreaked by the jihadists on the UNESCO world heritage site.<\/p>\n
An AFP correspondent inside Palmyra said some monuments, including the iconic Temple of Bel, lay in pieces almost a year after jihadists seized the site, but much of the ancient city was intact.<\/p>\n
Residential neighbourhoods in the adjacent modern town, where 70,000 people lived before the war, were deserted and damage there was widespread, the correspondent said.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The Islamic State group sparked a global outcry when they started destroying Palmyra's treasured monuments, which they consider idolatrous, after taking the city in May 2015.<\/p>\n
Syria's antiquities chief said the priceless artefacts had survived better than feared from a campaign of destruction UNESCO described as a \"war crime\".<\/p>\n
\"We were expecting the worst. But the landscape, in general, is in good shape,\" Maamoun Abdulkarim told AFP from Damascus.<\/p>\n
\"We could have completely lost Palmyra... The joy I feel is indescribable.\"<\/p>\n
- 'Lost to science' -<\/p>\n
Historian of the ancient world Maurice Sartre told AFP that Abdulkarim was already on his way from Damascus to begin a survey of the ruins.<\/p>\n
\"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.<\/p>\n
\"All the tombs we hadn't excavated and have now been totally pillaged are lost to science forever.\"<\/p>\n
IS had used Palmyra's ancient theatre as a venue for public executions and also murdered the city's 82-year-old former antiquities chief.<\/p>\n
The Syrian army said the city would now serve as a base to \"broaden operations\" against IS, including in its stronghold of Raqa and Deir Ezzor further east.<\/p>\n
At least 400 IS 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.<\/p>\n
\"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 AFP.<\/p>\n
The ancient city, northeast of Damascus, drew some 150,000 tourists a year before Syria's civil war and is known to Syrians as the \"Pearl of the Desert\".<\/p>\n
Syrian state television broadcast footage from inside Palmyra's famed museum, showing jagged pieces of sculptures on the ground and blanketed in dust.<\/p>\n
- Gains against IS -<\/p>\n
IS is under growing pressure from Syrian and Iraqi forces determined to retake bastions of its self-proclaimed \"caliphate\".<\/p>\n
On Thursday, the Iraqi army announced the launch of an offensive to eventually recapture second city Mosul, held by the jihadists since June 2014.<\/p>\n
Russian forces, which intervened in support of longtime ally Assad last September, were heavily involved in the Palmyra offensive despite a major drawdown last week.<\/p>\n
Russian warplanes carried out 40 combat sorties around Palmyra in the last 24 hours, striking 117 \"terrorist targets\" and killing 80 IS fighters, Moscow's defence ministry said Sunday.<\/p>\n
Putin telephoned Assad to congratulate the Syrian leader, adding that \"successes such as the liberation of Palmyra would be impossible without Russia's support,\" a Kremlin spokesman said.<\/p>\n
Assad said the victory was \"fresh proof of the efficiency of the Syrian army and its allies in fighting terrorism\".<\/p>\n
IS and its jihadist rival, the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Al-Nusra Front, are not party to a ceasefire in force across Syria since February 27.<\/p>\n
The truce has brought relative quiet to many areas across Syria, where more than 270,000 have been killed and millions had fled their homes in the last five years.<\/p>\n
The Observatory for Human Rights said on Sunday that 363 civilians had been killed since the truce went into effect -- the lowest monthly toll in four years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Archaeologists were rushing to the ancient city of Palmyra on Monday to assess the damage wreaked by the Islamic State group, after it was ousted by the Syrian army in a bloody battle. President Bashar al-Assad hailed the victory as \"important\" as Damascus reportedly dispatched experts to check the damage wreaked by the jihadists on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[],"ji_location":[2499],"class_list":["post-26608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other","ji_location-syria"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n