BEIRUT: Daesh militants (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) swept into the desert city of Palmyra in central Syria on Wednesday and by evening were in control of it, residents and Syrian state media said, a victory that gives them another strategically important prize five days after the group seized the Iraqi city of Ramadi.
Palmyra has special resonance, as home to some of the world’s most magnificent remnants of antiquity, as well as the grimmer modern landmark of Tadmur Prison, where Syrian dissidents have languished over the decades.
But for the fighters on the ground, the city of 50,000 people is significant because it sits among gas fields and astride a network of roads across the country’s central desert.
As they have swept across Syria and Iraq, Daesh fighters have destroyed or damaged numerous ancient sites and sculptures, condemning them as idolatry in slickly produced recruitment films, even as they pillage and sell off more portable items to finance their activities. That has raised fears both locally and internationally that Palmyra, a UN world heritage site, could also be irrevocably damaged.
Aside from the threat of destruction, Palmyra’s vast unexcavated antiquities could also provide significant revenue through illegal trafficking.
“The fighting is putting at risk one of the most significant sites in the Middle East,” Irina Bokova, director-general of UNESCO, said in a statement Wednesday.
As the city’s defenses crumbled, residents described panicked scenes of soldiers and the police fleeing, wounded civilians unable to reach hospitals and museum workers hurrying to pack up antiquities.
The loss of Palmyra, just as the United States is scrambling to come up with a response to the loss of Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s Anbar province, is sure to renew doubt about the Obama administration’s plans to defeat Daesh.
The two successes, at opposite ends of a battlefield sprawling across two countries, showed the Daesh’s ability to shake off setbacks and advance on multiple fronts, less than two months after it was driven from the Iraqi city of Tikrit - erasing any notion that the group had suffered a game-changing blow.
