ISIS Fighters Laid Mines Around Palmyra’s Ancient Ruins Before Retreating, Syrians Say
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Version 0 of 1. The Syrian forces that recaptured the storied city of Palmyra from Islamic State occupiers this past weekend have encountered dozens of mines that the expelled militants laid as booby traps around treasured ancient ruins sites, Syria’s state media reported Tuesday. Accounts of the Palmyra victory published by the official Syrian Arab News Agency also reported that Russia’s military, which has helped the Syrian forces regain momentum against insurgents with a six-month bombing campaign, was sending 100 mine clearance engineers and trainers of bomb-sniffing dogs to help rid Palmyra of the mines planted by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, ISIL and Daesh. The expulsion of the Islamic State from Palmyra, the ancient “Bride of the Desert” oasis seized by the militant extremist group 10 months ago, is regarded as a turn in the five-year-old war and an enormous propaganda victory for President Bashar al-Assad of Syria and the Russians. The Palmyra news also has left the United States and other Western and Arab opponents of Mr. Assad in the awkward position of welcoming it while still insisting that the Syrian president’s autocracy and suppression of dissent was the underlying cause of the Syria war. France, one of Mr. Assad’s most outspoken detractors, was the latest to react to the recapture of Palmyra. “The advances against Daesh today cannot erase the fact that the regime bears the main responsibility for the conflict and its 270,000 dead over the past five years,” a spokesman for France’s foreign ministry, Romain Nadal, told Agence France-Presse on Tuesday. It is unclear how the Palmyra victory by Mr. Assad’s forces might affect the diplomacy underway to establish peace negotiations. It came after Secretary of State John Kerry met with his Russian counterpart, Sergey V. Lavrov, and with President Vladimir V. Putin in Moscow last week to discuss Syria and the preservation of a partial cease-fire that has taken hold in some areas. The United Nations special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, is hoping to convene talks on April 9 in Geneva. Photographs and video images of Palmyra taken by the Syrian forces showed some horrific damage to parts of the 2,000-year-old ruins, a Unesco World Heritage site, including decapitated statues and busts with smashed faces. But Syria’s top antiquities official, Maamoun Abdulkarim, said Monday that 80 percent of the ruins appeared to remain intact. The Russians, who have been widely criticized by Mr. Assad’s opponents and international aid groups for intensive bombing in Syria, have sought to portray the recapture of Palmyra as a triumph of civilization over barbarism. On Sunday, the director general of Unesco, Irina Bokova, said she had been offered help to restore Palmyra, in a personal telephone call from Mr. Putin. Ms. Bokova, who has described the Islamic State’s destruction of Middle East artifacts as an atrocity against humanity, also said she intended to hold a conference of experts on reconstructing Syria’s cultural heritage by the end of April. Foreign news organizations have not been given direct access to Palmyra since the Islamic State retreated. But Syrian activists reached on Tuesday reported that large numbers of displaced civilians from areas thought to have been controlled by the militants were traveling to Azaz, a northwest town near the Turkish border that has become a magnet for hundreds of uprooted Syrians. The activists said many had come from the Palmyra area and from Deir al-Zour farther east. “We received about 100 families after Daesh allowed them to leave, which is something unusual,” said Mohamed al Abdalla, an activist reached in Azaz. “Honestly we weren’t expecting people from Palmyra and Deir al-Zour to arrive here.” |