Areas of Syria’s Palmyra seized by ISIS militants

One-third of Palmyra was captured by the militant group

by Jim Dean, Veterans Today.com: 

… from  Russia Today,  Moscow

[ Jim Dean Editor’s Note:  Palmyra has seen many conquerors come and go, but the stones still stand where the bones of the former have turned to dust.

VT is following up on leads that this attack by ISIL upon this site was requested by one of its outside supporters, as staging for something they have planned to follow by one of the usual state-sponsored terrorism suspects.

The assault on these world heritage sites was a classic military psyop, to tie down large numbers of Syrian and local militias guarding all of these sites, and where they are successfully attacked and destroyed, to use that to show that Assad cannot protect the country, as if that would be some sort of news revelation.

We all know that with terrorists from 85 countries using the NATO-Tel Aviv travel agency, the malcontent Takfiri losers have been taking murder and mayhem junkets to Syria and now Iraq.

I was first given this shocking number of 85 countries when meeting with the Syrian Speaker of the Parliament during my trip to the June 2014 elections. Somehow Western leaders think that we are not catching that this mob of flying-carpet killers could not be doing this without complicity by their respective countries.

And mind you, these are leaders of democracies… failed democracies, I might add, with failed political, military and Intel leadership who have allegiances that warrant more looking into.

And Saudi Arabia, where none of these historical treasures are found, has been promoting these Wahhabi extremist terrorists for a few decades with our own CIA, a marriage made in hell for sure.

Can this devil’s spawn be put back into the genie’s lamp, when they seem to have become a tool du jour for modern regime change?

Will we ever be able to hold those who are really behind all of this responsible when little Israel does its thing with what appears to be international immunity? If not, then when our turn comes, it will not really be a sad day, but one when it was just our turn… Jim W. Dean ]

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–  First published  …  May 20,  2015  –

After another round of heavy clashes with the Syrian army, Islamic State militants have seized areas in the north of ancient Palmyra, a landmark which UNESCO describes as an “oasis in the Syrian desert” northeast of Damascus.

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.

One-third of Palmyra was captured by the militant group, according to an estimate by the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group.

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. 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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