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May 20th, 2015 
David Schulberg Islamic State militants have taken control of almost all of the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra, a UNESCO landmark, according to a monitoring group. The city was captured after bloody clashes with the Syrian Army on Wednesday.
The Syrian Observatory
for Human Rights said the group had seized almost all of the
city, adding that it was not clear what had happened to Syrian
forces stationed at a military outpost on its outskirts.
ISIS militants entered
Palmyra from the north earlier Wednesday and gained control of a
local security office and a school, RT Arabic reported, сiting
local sources. According to a correspondent reporting from Homs,
there were clashes between the Syrian army and ISIS in the
northern part of Palmyra, and the militants intensified shelling
government forces’ positions.
Meanwhile, hundreds of statues have been moved from the Syrian
Palmyra to locations safe from ISIS militants on Wednesday,
Syria’s director of antiquities, Maamoun Abdulkarim, told
Reuters.
“Hundreds and hundreds of statues we were worried would be
smashed and sold are all now in safe places,” Abdulkarim
said. “The fear is for the museum and the large monuments
that cannot be moved,” Abdulkarim added. “This is the
entire world’s battle.”
Last week Islamic State militants battled with Syrian troops
within 2 kilometers of Palmyra, the Syrian Observatory for Human
Rights reported, raising fears the jihadists would completely
wreck the site, which UNESCO describes as a landmark of
“outstanding universal value.” Fierce fighting took the
lives of 110 combatants, as the militants appeared to be very
close to the ruins.
“Palmyra is under threat,” Rami Abdel Rahman, the
Observatory director, warned last week.
READ MORE:
Ancient Palmyra ‘under threat’, ISIS militants approach UNESCO
site
The remains of the ancient caravan city of Palmyra stand in the
middle of the desolate Tadmorean Desert in Syria.
Many fear that if Palmyra, which harbors the ruins of a great
city that was once one of the world’s key cultural hubs, falls
into the jihadists hands, it would suffer a fate of the ancient
Assyrian city of Nimrud, which they ruined earlier this year.
Last month a seven-minute video emerged, showing ISIS militants
destroying the historic landmark, Nimrud, which dates back to the
13th century BC, near the Islamic State-controlled city of Mosul
in northern Iraq. It showed the militants drilling away at
sculptures believed to be some 3,000 years old.
Islamic State militants, who have created a self-proclaimed
caliphate in northern Iraq and parts of Syria, previously
declared that they deem the artifacts as idolatrous. They have
been waging a campaign to obliterate cultural sites and relics
that fail to fall in line with their ideology.
Another video, released in April, showed ISIS fighters recklessly
destroying the 2,000-year-old ruins in the ancient city of Hatra
in northern Iraq, 110 kilometers south of Mosul.
In February, the jihadists obliterated ancient artifacts in the
Mosul Museum and blew up the Mosul Public Library using homemade
bombs. They also burned a number of books in Mosul’s Central
Library, sparing only Islamic publications.
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ISIS near to total control of Syria’s ancient Palmyra – monitoring group
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