Street battles rage as ISIL inches deeper into Damascus

A Palmyra resident, who goes by the name of Nasser al-Thaer, said IS militants set off a huge blast at 1:45 p.m. Sunday.

“Countries side Syria and Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan and the like are manner the substance of thousands of people escaping in the limits after which into Europe”.

“It is total destruction”, he said of the scene of the explosion. It did not provide details.

“But Daesh is across both the Syrian and Iraq border“.

It stood out among the ruins not far from the colonnades of Palmyra, which is affectionately known by Syrians as the “Bride of the Desert”.

ISIS militants fought street battles against Islamist rebels in Asali, part of the capital’s southern Qadam district, after seizing two streets there over the weekend, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The Islamic State group has executed more than 90 people, a third of them civilians, over the past month in areas of war-torn Syria it controls, a monitor said Sunday.

The pro-ISIS Aamaq News Agency reported that ISIS fighters seized half of Qadam.

“This is the closest ISIS has ever been to the heart of Damascus”, SOHR head Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.

Syria, meanwhile, is also opposed to the airstrikes, saying that the air campaign is being conducted without authorization from the Syrian government under the pretext of attacking the very terrorists that the US and its European and regional allies have supported since 2011 in an overt effort to overthrow the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

Though ISIS and other groups have carried out suicide attacks and other bombings in Damascus, they’ve never previously made any real attempts to move into the city itself, as the Syrian military was seen as having it so heavily defended it just wasn’t a practical target. Earlier this year, IS fighters entered the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk, east of Qadam, and control large parts of it.

In a separate report, the activist group said Monday that three Assad troops were killed in clashes with Syrian fighters in Daraya in the sprawling Eastern Ghouta.