Syria regime forces at entrance to IS-held Palmyra

Syrian pro-government forces advanced to the edge of the famed ancient city of Palmyra on Wednesday, eyeing a major symbolic victory over the Islamic State jihadist group, a monitor said.

"The regime forces are now two kilometres (a little more than a mile) away on the south side and five kilometres (three miles) away on the west side," Syrian Observatory for Human Rights director Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.

IS seized the city in May last year, sending shock waves around the world as the group demolished some of the most treasured monuments of its UNESCO-listed World Heritage Site.

Regime forces launched an offensive to retake the city at the start of the month backed by heavy Russian air strikes.

Moscow said last week that it was flying up to 25 sorties a day to help government forces liberate what President Vladimir Putin described as a "pearl of world civilisation".

But IS has fiercely resisted the advance, killing at least 26 pro-government fighters on Monday alone, the Observatory said.

Aamaq, an IS-linked news agency, claimed that 30 troops were killed in an attack by a jihadist suicide bomber.

IS has also claimed to have killed five Russian soldiers as well as fighters of Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah in the battle for Palmyra.

But there has been no confirmation from Moscow of the deaths of any soldiers or even of the presence of any military advisers on the ground.

The Kremlin has said that the offensive is being carried out by the Syrian army.

STRATEGIC PRIZE

The recapture of Palmyra would be a strategic as well as symbolic prize for the regime.

Whoever controls the oasis city also controls the surrounding desert -- an area of some 30,000 square kilometres (12,000 square miles) extending to the Iraqi border.

That would cut IS's area of control from some 40 percent of Syrian territory to 30 percent, according to the Observatory.

Global concern for Palmyra's magnificent ancient ruins spiked in September 2015, when satellite images confirmed that IS had demolished the famed Temple of Bel as part of its campaign to destroy pre-Islamic monuments it considers idolatrous.

UNESCO described the temple as one of the best preserved and most important religious edifices of the first century in the Middle East.

In October, the jihadists blew up the Arch of Triumph, dating from between 193 and 211 AD, as they pressed a campaign of destruction that UNESCO has said constitutes a war crime punishable by the International Criminal Court.

The jihadists have waged a sustained campaign of destruction against heritage sites in areas they control in Syria and Iraq and in August last year beheaded Palmyra's 82-year-old former antiquities chief.

The city was a major centre of the ancient world as it lay on the caravan route linking the Roman Empire with Persia and the east.

Situated about 210 kilometres (130 miles) northeast of Damascus, it drew 150,000 tourists a year before it became engulfed by Syria's devastating civil war.