ISIS storms Syrian city near Palmyra ruins

May 20, 2015 23:26

ISIS militants on Wednesday stormed and captured roughly a third of a central Syrian city that's just meters from the ancient ruins of Palmyra, according to the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

ISIS fighters entered Tadmur, the Arabic name for the modern city of thousands of people at the Palmyra site, after days of fighting with Syrian government forces in the area over the past week, the observatory said.

About 100 to 150 ISIS fighters were in the area Wednesday and were as close as 700 meters from Palmyra, said Rami Abdurrahman, the monitoring group's director.

The centuries-old temples and streets of Palmyra are a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the Homs countryside northeast of Damascus. United Nations and Syrian officials have expressed fears that ISIS aims to destroy the ruins, just as it bulldozed the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud and took sledgehammers to statues in Iraq's Mosul Museum.

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