ISIS released its Daily Bulletin Thursday.
The Islamic State just took control of the historic city of Palmyra, Syria.
The Islamic State now controls 50% of Syria.
Palmyra is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible and in the annals of the Assyrian kings. The historic Roman city was subjected to wide scale looting and damaged by the clashes during the Syrian civil war.
FOX News reported:
The Islamic State terror group now controls over half of Syrian territory after seizing the village and archaeological site of Palmyra Thursday, activists monitoring Syria’s civil war said.
Rami Abdurrahman of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told the Associated Press the extremists overran the archaeological site, just to the southwest of the modern settlement on Palmyra, shortly after midnight local time.
In Damascus, state TV acknowledged that pro-government forces had withdrawn from the town. A Facebook page close to ISIS published a statement Thursday, purportedly from the group, saying “the soldiers of the Islamic State” completed their control of Palmyra. The capture came after government forces collapsed, “leaving large numbers of dead whose bodies filled the streets,” it said.
An activist in the central province of Homs who goes by the name of Bebars al-Talawy said ISIS has taken over the ruins at the UNESCO world heritage site famous for its 2,000-year-old towering Roman-era colonnades and other ruins and priceless artifacts. Before the war, thousands of tourists a year visited the remote desert outpost, a cherished landmark referred to by Syrians as the “Bride of the Desert.”