ISIS Captures Ancient Syrian City of Palmyra
Islamic State forces captured another key Syrian territory Wednesday night, toppling government forces in the ancient city of Palmyra.
As the New York Times notes, the fall of Palmyra is another strategic win for the Islamic State, giving the Sunni Muslim extremists access to gas fields and roads that lead them through the desert blanketing central Syria, edging them closer toward the capital in Damascus. Palmyra’s fall comes just days after ISIS captured Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s Anbar province.
Rami Abdulrahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told Reuters that 100 pro-Syrian government soldiers were killed in the battle for the city; local police and soldiers were also seen fleeing the city. By Wednesday evening, Islamic State fighters had taken over an air base and Tadmur Prison, where Syrian dissidents have been held for years. From the Times:
There were conflicting reports about Tadmur Prison — Syria’s equivalent of Abu Ghraib in Iraq, where dissidents were long held and tortured. The spectacle of opening its doors could be a propaganda coup for the Islamic State militants, but residents said that the most high-profile political prisoners — Islamists and senior army defectors — had been moved in recent days to another prison closer to Damascus, a possible sign the government knew defeat was coming.
The Lebanese news channel MTV reported that 27 Lebanese citizens had been freed, prompting immediate speculation that they were among the Lebanese who have been missing for decades in Syria. Some inmates in Tadmur Prison have been there since a Muslim Brotherhood uprising in 1982 was crushed, and dissidents, including secular leftists, were rounded up en masse.
Museum employees were also seen scrambling to pack up and ship out prized antiquities cherished by Syrians and historians alike, fearing they would be demolished (or sold off) by ISIS forces as they have done before. Palmyra is a United Nations world heritage site.
With Palmyra, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights projects, ISIS now has control of more than half of Syria, but “areas it holds are mostly sparsely inhabited.”
