First Palmyra residents to return on Saturday: Syrian official

Displaced residents of the famed Syrian city of Palmyra, recently recaptured by the Syrian army, will begin returning to their homes at the weekend, a government official told AFP on Thursday.  

Syria's armed forces recaptured Palmyra and the adjacent world-famous ruins from the Islamic State on 27 March, ending nearly 10 months of militant rule. 

IS overran the city in May 2015, spurring thousands of residents to flee west towards the government-held city of Homs. 

"The first group of buses transporting residents back to Palmyra will leave on Saturday (from Homs). The residents started to register their names today," a provincial government official told AFP.

Much of Palmyra's pre-war population of nearly 70,000 people fled when IS took the city last year.

An estimated 15,000 residents stayed on under IS rule and fled during the Syrian army's offensive to retake the city. Their whereabouts are unknown. 

Last week, a former resident told MEE that many of those who left were sheltering in the desert outside the town. A local journalist, Mohammed Taha, told Radio Monte Carlo that, ahead of the Syrian army's advance, IS had ordered all civilians to leave the city.

The group moved them into a desert about 15km from the city "without shelter, food or water," Taha was reported as saying. "They have just been left lying on the ground, with no cover but the sky."

Provincial officials have said that nearly 45 percent of the neighbourhoods of Tadmour, the modern city near to the ancient site, have been destroyed.

Many apartment blocks had partially collapsed walls and some had been totally demolished, AFP journalists who visited the city after its recapture reported. 

Authorities this week began restoring power lines in the city and repairs to housing began on Wednesday, provincial governor Talal Barazi told state news agency SANA. 

Before the civil war erupted in 2011, more than 150,000 tourists a year visited the celebrated ancient ruins at Palmyra, which included colonnaded streets and 2,000-year-old temples.

But IS destroyed many of Palmyra's most striking monuments, including the Temple of Bel and a dozen of its lavishly decorated tower tombs. 

The militants used the city's ancient amphitheatre as a venue for public executions.