Syrian government forces continued to battle Islamic State fighters around Palmyra on Saturday as they pressed their offensive to recapture the desert city from Isis militants, state media and a monitoring group said.
Syrian state television said the army, which drove Isis fighters out of the symbolic and strategic old citadel overlooking the west of the city on Friday, took full control of the northern district of Al-Amiriya.
But the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said fighting continued in that area, adding that Isis militants had launched counter-attacks – including car bombings – against government forces advancing in the city.
The recapture of Palmyra, which the Islamist militants seized in May 2015, would mark the biggest reversal for Isis in Syria since Russia’s intervention turned the tide of the five-year conflict in president Bashar al-Assad’s favour. Syrian army and allied militia fighters, backed by heavy Russian and Syrian airstrikes, have been fighting on the edges of the city for several days.
The UK-based observatory, which monitors the fighting through a network of sources within Syria, reported overnight fighting inside Palmyra in the neighbourhoods of Mutaqa’ideen and al-Jami’a.
Television footage from the citadel on Saturday showed a soldier waving a Syrian national flag by the medieval castle walls, while smoke rose from a central city district.
Palmyra had a population of 50,000 according to a census more than 10 years ago. Those numbers were swelled hugely by an influx of people displaced by Syria’s conflict, which has raged since 2011, but most fled when Isis took over.
Recapturing the city would open up eastern Syria, where Isis controls most of the Euphrates Valley provinces of Deir ez-Zor and Raqqa, to the army.
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