Syria forces retake ancient Palmyra in major victory over IS


President Bashar al-Assad hailed the victory as an "important achievement" as his Russian counterpart and key backer Vladimir Putin congratulated Damascus for retaking the UNESCO world heritage site.
An AFP correspondent inside Palmyra said monuments destroyed by the jihadists -- like the iconic Temple of Bel -- were in pieces but that much of the ancient city was intact.
Residential neighbourhoods in the adjacent modern town were deserted and damage was widespread, the correspondent said.
A group of regime fighters took time off to celebrate their win and kicked around a football in the middle of a street strewn with debris.
The jihadists sparked a global outcry after seizing Palmyra in May 2015 and setting about destroying some of its treasured monuments.
But Syria's antiquities chief on Sunday said the city's priceless artefacts were in much better shape than feared.
"We were expecting the worst. But the landscape, in general, is in good shape," Maamun Abdulkarim told AFP from Damascus.
"We could have completely lost Palmyra... The joy I feel is indescribable."
The Syrian army said that Sunday's victory meant the city would now serve as a base to "broaden operations" against IS, including in its stronghold of Raqa and Deir Ezzor further east.
Backed by a barrage of Russian air strikes, Syrian troops and allied militia launched a major offensive to retake Palmyra this month.
The city is both a symbolic and strategic prize for Assad's forces, as it provides control of the surrounding desert extending all the way to the Iraqi border.
At least 400 IS fighters were killed in the battle for the city, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. On the government side, 188 troops and militiamen were killed.
"That's the heaviest losses that IS has sustained in a single battle since its creation" in 2013, the director of the Britain-based monitoring group, Rami Abdel Rahman, told AFP.
He said two cars packed with explosives blew up in the afternoon, one west of Palmyra and the other northeast of the city.
- Jihadists under pressure -
After seizing Palmyra last year, IS blew up two of the site's treasured temples, its triumphal arch and a dozen tower tombs, in a campaign of destruction that UNESCO described as a war crime.
The jihadists used Palmyra's ancient theatre as a venue for public executions and also murdered the city's 82-year-old former antiquities chief.
A military source told AFP on Sunday that IS militants had retreated towards the east as the army made its final push.
Army sappers defused roadside mines in both the modern part of the city and in the old ruins.
Syrian state television broadcast footage from inside Palmyra's famed museum, showing jagged pieces of sculptures on the ground and blanketed in dust.
IS, behind a string of attacks in the West including last week's Brussels bombings, is under growing pressure from Syrian and Iraqi forces determined to retake bastions of its self-proclaimed "caliphate".
On Thursday, the Iraqi army announced the launch of an offensive to eventually recapture second city Mosul, held by the jihadists since June 2014.
- Palmyra 'will return' -
Russian forces, which intervened in support of longtime ally Assad last September, were heavily involved in the Palmyra offensive despite a major drawdown last week.
Russian warplanes carried out 40 combat sorties around Palmyra in the last 24 hours, striking 117 "terrorist targets" and killing 80 IS fighters, Moscow's defence ministry said Sunday.
Putin telephoned Assad to congratulate the Syrian leader, adding that "successes such as the liberation of Palmyra would be impossible without Russia's support," a Kremlin spokesman said.
Assad said the victory was "fresh proof of the efficiency of the Syrian army and its allies in fighting terrorism".
IS and its jihadist rival, the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Al-Nusra Front, are not party to a landmark ceasefire in Syria since February 27.
The month-long truce has brought relative quiet to many areas across Syria, where more than 270,000 have been killed and millions had fled their homes in the last five years.
The truce took effect before the resumption in mid-March of UN-brokered indirect peace talks between the Syrian government and the opposition.
Palmyra, northeast of Damascus, drew some 150,000 tourists a year before Syria's civil war and is known to Syrians as the "Pearl of the Desert".
Syrian officials, including antiquities chief Abdulkarim, have vowed to rebuild the ancient monuments.
"Palmyra will return to the way it was," he said.

Islamic State driven out of Syria's ancient Palmyra city

Syrian government forces recaptured Palmyra on Sunday, state media and a monitoring group said, inflicting a significant defeat on the Islamic State group which seized the city last year and dynamited its ancient temples.
Syrian television quoted a military source saying the army and its militia allies took complete control of the city and were clearing mines and bombs laid by the militants.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said there was still gunfire in the eastern part of the city on Sunday morning but the bulk of the Islamic State force had pulled out and retreated east, leaving Palmyra under President Bashar al-Assad's control.
For government forces, the recapture of Palmyra opens up much of Syria's eastern desert stretching to the Iraqi border to the south and Islamic State heartland of Deir al-Zor and Raqqa to the east.
It follows a three-week campaign by the army and its allies on the ground, backed by intensive Russian air strikes, aimed at driving Islamic State back.
Russia's intervention in September turned the tide of Syria's five-year-old conflict in Assad's favor. Despite its announcement that it was pulling out most military forces two weeks ago, Russian jets and helicopters carried out dozens of strikes daily over Palmyra at the height of the clashes.
Observatory director Rami Abdulrahman said 400 Islamic State fighters died in the battle for Palmyra, which he described as the biggest single defeat for the group since it declared a caliphate in areas of Syria and Iraq under its control in 2014.
The loss of Palmyra comes three months after Islamic State fighters were driven out of the city of Ramadi in neighboring Iraq, the first major victory for Iraq's army since it collapsed in the face of an assault by the militants in June 2014.
Islamic State has lost ground elsewhere, including the Iraqi city of Tikrit last year and the Syrian town of al-Shadadi in February. The United States said the fall of Shadadi was part of efforts to cut Islamic State's links between its two main power centers: the cities of Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria.
The Observatory said around 180 government soldiers and allied fighters were also killed in the campaign to retake Palmyra, which is home to some of the most extensive ruins of the Roman empire.
Islamic State militants dynamited several monuments last year, but Syria's antiquities chief told Reuters on Saturday that other ancient landmarks were still standing.

Backstory: Behind the terror takedown


When a U.S. special operations team suddenly surrounded the car carrying the Islamic State's second in command, he was given the split-second option of surrendering. Instead, he began firing.
"He made a bad choice," a senior military source told Fox News.
Abd al-Rahman Mustafa al-Qaduli, also known as Abu Ala al-Afri and Haji Imam, died in a hail of bullets early Thursday morning on an isolated road in eastern Syria, a location described by U.S. military officials as being "in the middle of nowhere."
Defense Secretary Ash Carter told a press conference Friday he was ISIS' finance minister. But the terror leader also was considered the man most likely to take over for ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, if he were captured or killed.
Details of the takedown emerged Friday, including descriptions of the elite U.S. assault force arriving in helicopters as drones flew overhead, tracking him.
When al-Afri refused to surrender, he and all those with him were killed. If he had been captured, he would have been interrogated and then handed over to Iraqi authorities.
The U.S. team had been practicing the mission for weeks. "It was a really good mission," one source familiar with the developments told Fox News. "It was precision and went as planned."
"We are systematically eliminating ISIL's cabinet," Carter said at the news conference. 
“The removal of this ISIL leader will hamper the organization’s ability to conduct operations both inside and outside of Iraq and Syria."
Carter described the target as responsible for funding ISIS operations and involved in some external affairs and plots. 
He said this was the second senior leader successfully targeted this month, in addition to the group’s “minister of war” Omar al-Shishani, or “Omar the Chechen,” killed in a recent U.S. airstrike. 
A U.S. official told Fox News that the Brussels terror attack earlier this week prompted the raid in Syria.
Al-Afri is a former physics professor from Iraq who originally joined Al Qaeda in 2004. After spending time in an Iraqi prison, he was released in 2012 and traveled to Syria to join up with what is now ISIS. 
On May 14, 2014, the U.S. Department of the Treasury designated him as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” for his role with ISIS. 
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joe Dunford, also said at the press conference that more U.S. troops might be headed to Iraq soon.
"The secretary and I both believe that there will be an increase to the U.S. forces in Iraq in the coming weeks,” Dunford said. “But that decision hasn't been made."
He added that despite a number of high profile strikes against the terrorists, by no means would I say that we're about to break the back of ISIL or that the fight is over."
Fox News’ Lucas Tomlinson and Jennifer Griffin contributed to this report.