Mass grave discovered in Palmyra after recapture from IS

A mass grave containing 40 bodies has been discovered by the Syrian army in Palmyra after the city’s recapture from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), according to state news agency SANA.

The discovery comes as Syria’s partial ceasefire appears to be unravelling after at least 25 pro-government fighters died in clashes with opposition forces near Aleppo.

The Syrian army, backed by heavy Russian air strikes, drove Islamic State out of Palmyra last Sunday, inflicting what the army called a mortal blow to militants who had dynamited the city’s ancient temples. State news agency SANA reported that government forces had uncovered the mass grave after the area, home to world-renowned Roman ruins.

"A field source told a SANA reporter that as the engineering units and popular defence groups were combing the area, they uncovered the mass grave and managed to pull 25 corpses, three of them children and five others women, in Masakin al-Jahizia neighbourhood in the city," a report on the news agency's website said.

"Later, the source said that the number of bodies removed from the grave has reached 40 after pulling out 15 bodies, all of them belonging to women and children."

A military source told the AFP that the Syrian military ad found a grave site where officers, soldiers, members of pro-regime committees and their relatives had been buried.

Twenty-four of the victims were civilians, including three children, the source said. “They were executed either by beheading or by shooting.”

The grave was on the north-eastern edge of Palmyra, according to the news agency.

The bodies have been transferred to a military hospital in the provincial capital, Homs, and some have been identified, according to the source.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the five-year-old Syrian conflict through a network of sources on the ground, said that Islamic State had killed a number of people at an earlier time and buried them on the outskirts of the city.

During its occupation of Palmyra, Isis killed at least 280 people, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based monitor that confirmed the discovery of the mass grave.

Soon after Isis took the city, its fighters shot dead 25 soldiers in the ancient Roman theatre. It later released a video of the mass killing in which the killers appeared to be children or teenagers.

The Observatory reported on Saturday that fighting between Syrian forces and Islamic State around Qaryatain to the west of Palmyra. It also reported, and Russian and Syrian air strikes in the same area and to the east of Palmyra around the town of Sukhna.

Attacks by government forces against Islamic State positions to the around Palmyra are aimed at moving east across the desert to Islamic State-held Deir al-Zor near the Iraqi border, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has said.

More than 250,000 people have been killed during the war in Syria and millions have fled the country.