ISIS controls 50 percent of Syria after takeover of Palmyra, monitoring group says

The Islamic State terror group controls over half of Syrian territory after seizing the village and archaeological site of Palmyra in the central part of the country Thursday, activists monitoring Syria's civil war said.
Rami Abdurrahman of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told the Associated Press the extremists overran the archaeological site, just to the southwest of the modern settlement on Palmyra, shortly after midnight local time.
An activist in the central province of Homs who goes by the name of Bebars al-Talawy also says that Islamic State, commonly known as ISIS, now controls the ruins at the UNESCO world heritage site famous for its 2,000-year-old towering Roman-era colonnades and other ruins and priceless artifacts. Before the war, thousands of tourists a year visited the remote desert outpost, a cherished landmark referred to by Syrians as the "Bride of the Desert."
Both activists said Thursday that ISIS had not damaged the ruins so far. ISIS has previously destroyed major archaeological sites in Iraq that predate the founding of Islam. Sky News reported that hundreds of statues and artifacts had been taken to safety ahead of the ISIS advance, but larger items, such as stone tombs, could not be removed in time. 
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that ISIS had also seized control of Palmyra's military air base, prison and intelligence headquarters. The Associated Press reported that the prison, known as Tadmur, is where thousands of Syrian dissidents have been imprisoned and tortured over the years.
An amateur video posted online showed ISIS fighters, allegedly inside the prison, burning a giant poster of Syrian President Bashar Assad and cheering as flames rose around them against the night sky. The video and its location could not be independently verified, but appeared genuine and corresponded to other AP reporting of the events.