Government Retakes Palmyra from ISIS

Pro-government forces backed by heavy airstrikes retook the city of Palmyra from ISIS over the weekend, promising to continue its advances against other jihadist strongholds in the country.

The Syrian government’s recapture of the ancient city marks the first major loss for ISIS since an international coalition formed last year to defeat it.

The extent of destruction stemming from ISIS’s 10-month rule in the city known to Syrians as the “Bride of the Desert” remains unclear. Initial footage shown on Syrian TV showed Palmyra’s grand colonnades to be intact and in relatively good condition, but surrounded by rubble and shattered statues, the Associated Press reports.

An AFP correspondent in the city said monuments destroyed by the extremist militants included the iconic Temple of Bel, and that the residential neighborhoods of the city, where some 70,000 people lived before the war, were completely deserted.

ISIS now faces pressure on several fronts. The Syrian army and its allied militias now have a new path to the group’s de facto capital in Raqqa and the eastern city of Deir Ezzor, while Kurdish militias make steady advances in the country’s north.

The Syrian government’s head of Antiquities Mamoun Abdelkarim promised Saturday to rebuild the site as best as possible and to return any looted artifacts.

“We will rebuild them with the stones that remain, and with the remaining columns,” he said. “(We will) bring life back to Palmyra.”

Increasing Clashes Between CIA and Pentagon-backed Groups

Fighting in northern rural Aleppo between Syrian militias armed by different branches of the United States government has intensified over the past two months, the Los Angeles Times reports.

CIA-backed groups and Pentagon-backed groups have increasingly traded fire on the outskirts of Syria’s northernmost city, U.S. officials and rebel leaders confirmed, highlighting how little control U.S. military planners have over the groups they support.

Arab rebel groups backed by the CIA have repeatedly clashed with the Pentagon-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a group primarily led by Kurdish militias, since February of this year.

In mid-February, a CIA-supported group called Fursan al-Haq was run out of the strategic town of Marea, north of Aleppo, as the Pentagon-supported SDF moved in to the area from Kurdish-controlled areas to the east.

The area surrounding the city of Aleppo is home to two simultaneous battles: one between the Assad government and its opponents, and another against ISIS, which controls much of eastern Syria in addition to swaths of land northwest of Aleppo. Tensions between the area’s three ethnic groups – Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen – have been heightened.

Adam Schiff, the top Democrat representative in the House Intelligence Committee described the clashes as a “fairly new phenomenon,” but “an enormous challenge.”

“It is part of the three-dimensional chess that is the Syrian battlefield,” he said.

“This is a complicated, multi-sided war where our options are severely limited,” added an anonymous U.S. official. “We know we need a partner on the ground. We can’t defeat ISIL without that part of the equation, so we keep trying to forge those relationships,” he said, using an alternative acronym to refer to ISIS.

Civilian Deaths Drop to Four-Year Low

The civilian death toll in Syria this past month was the lowest in the last four years, AFP reports.

Some 360 civilians were killed in the first month of the cease-fire set in place late last month, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told AFP.

According to the Observatory, 174 civilians, including 41 children, had been killed since the cease-fire went into effect on February 27.

In territory controlled by ISIS and the al-Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front, two groups excluded from the truce, another 189 civilians were killed.

The total of 363 civilian deaths is a significant drop in comparison to the previous month’s figure of 1,100 civilians, including 234 children.

The past month’s civilian death toll marks the lowest number of civilian deaths since November 2011, just eight months after the uprising began, when 296 civilians were killed.

Recommended Reads

• NPR: Photographer Who Vowed to Stay Flees Violence in Syria
• The Guardian: Restoring Syria’s Pearl of the Desert: a Reason for Optimism Amid the Storm of Terror
• France24: Preserving Syria’s Threatened Treasures in Digital
• NPR: In Syria, Assyrian Christians Cling on After ISIS Onslaught
• The National Interest: Russia’s Artful Exit from Syria
• NPR: Pentagon’s Evolving Strategy: Treat the Islamic State Like a State
• New Statesman: Amid a Fragile Ceasefire, Syria’s Original Protesters are Rediscovering Their Voice
• The Washington Post: Damascus’s Crossroads of Dissent and the Displaced
• Business Insider: Photographs Reveal the Destruction Left Behind by ISIS in the Ancient City of Palmyra
• The Daily Beast: How the Syrian Revolt Became Armed

Top image: Syrian government soldiers patrol a street in the ancient city of Palmyra, central Syria on Sunday March 27, 2016. (SANA via AP)