Islamic State militants shot dead around 20 men in an ancient amphitheatre in the Syrian city of Palmyra yesterday, accusing them of being government supporters, a group monitoring the conflict said. Reuters was unable to independently confirm the report from the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The hardline Sunni militants took control of the central city, also known as Tadmur, from government forces last week and have killed at least 200 people and taken around 600 captive, according to the Observatory.
“They executed around 20 men in the Roman amphitheatre and called people to watch,” said the Observatory’s Rami Abdulrahman, citing sources inside the city.
Supporters of Islamic State wrote on Twitter that a number of people had been killed by the group inside the amphitheatre, which forms part of the city’s 2,000-year-old ruins which are a Unesco World Heritage site.
The Syrian people are losing hope, they cannot afford to wait
Islamic State’s takeover of Palmyra marked the first time the group had seized a Syrian city directly from government control. The other population centres it holds were mostly taken from rival insurgent groups in Syria’s four-year conflict.
Meanwhile the people of Syria are losing hope in the fifth year of a civil war that has brought levels of death and destruction that are so extreme they should shock the world’s collective conscience, the United Nations chief said in a report on Syria.
The war has killed more than 220,000 people and left a third of the population homeless. Of the country’s roughly 23 million people, some 12.2 million are in need of humanitarian aid, including five million children, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in his monthly report published yesterday.
“The level of carnage and devastation throughout the Syrian Arab Republic should shock the collective conscience of the world,” said Ban’s report, which covers the month of April and was largely prepared by outgoing UN humanitarian chief Valerie Amos.
“The Syrian people are losing hope,” he said. “They cannot afford to wait. A political solution must be found.
“The conflict will end with a political settlement, not with a military solution,” Ban added. “The sooner that that is recognised by all those engaged in the conflict, the better it will be for the Syrian people and the more lives will be saved.”
UN-mediated peace talks have resumed in Geneva, but diplomats say no breakthroughs have emerged.