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Fears for Palmyra's ancient treasures as Isis retakes northern part of Syrian city Fears for Palmyra's ancient treasures as Isis retakes northern part of Syrian city
(about 2 hours later)
Islamic State fighters have seized control of the northern sector of the Syrian city of Palmyra, a monitor and activists have said, triggering renewed fears about the ancient site’s historic treasures. Islamic State fighters have inched closer to the centre of Palmyra, seizing a third of the historic city in a seesaw battle with Bashar al-Assad’s regime that endangers thousands of civilians and the Unesco world heritage site’s ancient ruins.
“The situation is very bad. If only five members of Isis go into the ancient buildings, they’ll destroy everything,” Syria’s antiquities chief, Maamoun Abdulkarim, said, calling for international action to save the city. “[Isis] is advancing into the city with artillery and suicide bombers and is tilting the balance in its favour,” Ahmad al-Nasser, an activist with the pro-opposition Local Coordination Committee of Tadmur, the modern name for Palmyra, told the Guardian. “There are thousands of civilians with the regime and if it falls there will be a huge massacre.”
Palmyra’s Unesco world heritage site, including ancient temples and colonnaded streets, is located in the city’s south-west. Hundreds of statues and ancient artefacts from its museum have already been transferred out of the city, Abdulkarim said, but many others - including massive tombs – could not be moved. Syrian state television said pro-government militias were evacuating residents from the besieged city as clashes continued between Assad’s forces and Isis militants, Reuters reported.
It was the second time Isis has overrun northern Palmyra in the past five days. Its fighters seized the same neighbourhoods on Saturday but held them for less than 24 hours. Activists and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group, said Isis militants had seized northern districts of the city and an intelligence building in the area after a week of fighting against the regime and loyalist militias, who had repelled a similar incursion over the weekend.
Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said Isis had seized roughly “a third of Palmyra” on Wednesday. After heavy fighting on the northern edges of the city, Isis fighters entered the northern quarter “without their vehicles”. They seized a state security building and fanned out across northern districts as Assad regime forces fled, the monitoring group’s head said. They said the Assad regime responded with air strikes against areas under the militants’ control and gathered reinforcements from around the city, and posted snipers on the rooftops.
“People are very afraid of what will happen, because Isis has the capability to get to the heart of Palmyra,” said Khaled al-Homsi, an activist in the city. He said terrified residents were staying at home and that government forces were on the defensive. Related: Palmyra: is saving priceless antiquity as important as saving people?
Asked if Isis would be able to reach the city’s ancient ruins, a Syrian military source said anything was possible in urban warfare. He acknowledged the jihadis had infiltrated northern neighbourhoods and said they were engaged in “street fighting” with regime forces. The siege of Palmyra, an ancient Silk Road hub with magnificent ruins and an ancient temple as well as a storied mythology, has drawn concerns that Isis may raze the ruins like they did at several historic sites in Iraq’s Nineveh, where the terror group holds sway.
Mohammad Hassan Homsi, another activist originally from Palmyra, said Syrian soldiers fled after Isis took the state security building. “They headed to the military intelligence headquarters near the ruins,” he said. Activists said the regime had transported some of the artefacts to Damascus and Hama, but most of the city’s wealth of antiquities is either too heavy to carry or consists of ancient buildings.
Homsi said jihadi fighters from the flashpoint border town of Kobani, where US-led air strikes helped Kurdish fighters defeat Isis in January, were among those fighting in Palmyra. Isis also took control on Monday of two crucial gas fields north-east of Palmyra, Arak and al-Hail, which supply much of the electricity to areas under regime control in western Syria.
Isis began its offensive on Palmyra on 13 May, seizing a nearby town and two gas fields, and leaving more than 350 people dead. Assad’s forces appeared to withdraw closer to the city centre in the face of the Isis advance, a development that puzzled locals, who say the regime is well-supplied in the area.
The city is strategically located at the crossroads of key highways leading west to Damascus and Homs, and east to Iraq. But analysts said the regime could be debating whether to make a major stand in Palmyra, portraying itself as the guardian of Syria’s history against nihilistic enemies bent on destroying it, or to cut its losses and retrench closer to its redoubts in the west of the country. The army is stretched thin, having lost a string of battles in Idlib to the north, to rebels backed by Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
“There’s a calculus going on in the regime’s mind about what to do,” said Amr al-Azm, a former Syrian antiquities official who now works with the opposition. “I think the regime is... sooner or later, especially with losses in the north ... going to start to redeploy and retrench.”
“If Isis wants Palmyra, it can take it,” he added.
Such a loss would be a significant victory for Isis. The gas fields are crucial because the militant group can then control the supply and sell electricity to regime-held areas, and seizing the town would open the road to Damascus and Homs, crucial regime strongholds, and sever supply lines to Deir Ezzor in the east, where Isis is also fighting the regime.
The ruins would provide a rich source of looted antiquities that can be sold to black market buyers for a profit, and the destruction of the ruins, including the historic Temple of Bel, would be a propaganda boost to the militants that shows their ability to act with impunity and the impotence of the international community.
Isis has also drawn closer to the notorious Tadmur military prison, a symbol of state oppression for decades whose inmates it will seek to free.
More than anything, the battle for Palmyra has brought to a head the contradictions inherent to the American-led campaign against Isis in the country, now facing demands to strike at the Isis advance towards the ruins in direct aid of the Assad regime, but turning a blind eye towards the government’s own bombing of civilians.
“We’re trapped between a rock and a hard place,” said Azm. “In me there’s a sense of deep resentment that this binary narrative that the regime has worked so hard to impose on Syria has actually finally paid off.
“They succeeded in fostering and encouraging and allowing to emerge such a horrible entity that when you put the regime next to them, the regime seems to be a more benign option than them,” he added.