Syrian government forces have recaptured Palmyra, inflicting a significant defeat on the Islamic State group which seized the city last year and dynamited its ancient temples. The army and its militia allies took complete control of the city and were clearing mines and bombs laid by the militants.

• The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said there was still gunfire in the eastern part of the city on Sunday morning but the bulk of the IS force had pulled out and retreated east, leaving Palmyra under President Bashar al-Assad’s control.
• For government forces, the recapture of Palmyra opens up much of Syria’s eastern desert stretching to the Iraqi border to the south and IS heartland of Deir al-Zor and Raqqa to the east.
• It follows a three-week campaign by the army and its allies on the ground, backed by intensive Russian air strikes, aimed at driving IS back.
• Russia’s intervention in September turned the tide of Syria’s five-year-old conflict in Assad’s favour.
• Despite its announcement that it was pulling out most military forces two weeks ago, Russian jets and helicopters carried out dozens of strikes daily over Palmyra at the height of the clashes.
• Observatory director Rami Abdulrahman said 400 IS fighters died in the battle for Palmyra, which he described as the biggest single defeat for the group since it declared a caliphate in areas of Syria and Iraq under its control in 2014.

IS has lost ground elsewhere, including the Iraqi city of Tikrit last year and the Syrian town of al-Shadadi in February. The United States said the fall of Shadadi was part of efforts to cut Islamic State’s links between its two main power centres: the cities of Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria.