Syria Army Progresses towards Daesh-Held Palmyra

Local Editor

The Syrian Army advanced to the edge of the famed ancient city of Palmyra Wednesday, eyeing a major symbolic victory over Daesh [the Arabi Acronym for the terrorist "ISIS" group].

"The regime forces are now two kilometers [a little more than a mile] away on the south side and five kilometers [three miles] away on the west side," the so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights director Rami Abdel Rahman announced.

Daesh seized the city in May last year, sending shock waves around the world as the group demolished some of the most treasured monuments of its UNESCO-listed World Heritage Site.

Government forces launched an offensive to retake the city at the start of the month.

Moscow said last week that it was flying up to 25 sorties a day to help government forces liberate what President Vladimir Putin described as a "pearl of world civilization".

The Kremlin has said that the offensive is being carried out by the Syrian army.

The recapture of Palmyra would be a strategic as well as symbolic prize for the government.

Whoever controls the oasis city also controls the surrounding desert -- an area of some 30,000 square kilometers extending to the Iraqi border.

That would cut Daesh's area of control from some 40 percent of Syrian territory to 30 percent, according to the Observatory.

Global concern for Palmyra's magnificent ancient ruins spiked in September 2015, when satellite images confirmed that Daesh had demolished the famed Temple of Bel as part of its campaign to destroy pre-Islamic monuments it considers idolatrous.

UNESCO described the temple as one of the best preserved and most important religious edifices of the first century in the Middle East.

In October, the extremists blew up the Arch of Triumph, dating from between 193 and 211 AD, as they pressed a campaign of destruction that UNESCO has said constitutes a war crime punishable by the International Criminal Court.

The extremists have waged a sustained campaign of destruction against heritage sites in areas they control in Syria and Iraq and in August last year beheaded Palmyra's 82-year-old former antiquities chief.

The city was a major center of the ancient world as it lay on the caravan route linking the Roman Empire with Persia and the east.

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team