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A monitoring
group said the fighting was still outside the city, after a
rapid advance the day before brought the army and its allies
right up to its outskirts.
The Syrian army earlier this month launched a concerted
offensive to retake Palmyra, which the ultra-hardline Islamist
militants seized in May 2015, to open a road to the mostly
IS-held eastern province of Deir al-Zor.
The state-run news channel Ikhbariya broadcast images from just
outside Palmyra and said government fighters had taken over a
hotel district in the west. A soldier interviewed by Ikhbariya
said the army and its allies would press forward beyond Palmyra.
"We say to those gunmen, we are advancing to Palmyra, and to
what's beyond Palmyra, and God willing to Raqqa, the center of
the Daesh gangs," he said, referring to Islamic State's de facto
capital in northern Syria.
The state news agency SANA showed warplanes flying overhead,
helicopters firing missiles, and soldiers and armored vehicles
approaching the city.
Civilians began fleeing after Islamic State fighters told them
via loudspeakers to leave the center as fighting drew closer,
the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. The
Observatory monitors the war using a network of sources on the
ground.
Islamic State has blown up ancient temples and tombs since
capturing Palmyra in what the U.N. cultural agency UNESCO has
called a war crime. The city, located at a crossroads in central
Syria, is surrounded mostly by desert.
The capture of Palmrya and further eastward advances into Deir
al-Zor would mark the most significant Syrian government gain
against IS since the start of Russia's military intervention
last September.
With Russia's help, Damascus has already taken back some ground
from IS, notably east of Aleppo, Syria's biggest city and
commercial hub before the war.
(Reporting by John Davison and Dominic Evans; Editing by Mark
Heinrich)
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