Reuters reports: Islamic State fighters battled government forces on Tuesday at central Syria’s Jazal oilfield, the last such facility still partly under state control, a group monitoring the conflict reported.

Clashes broke out at dawn at the site which has been shut down by several days of fighting, Rami Abdulrahman, from the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said.

The Observatory, which monitors Syria’s conflict through a network of sources on the ground, had said on Monday the militants had seized all of the facility – a report denied by the government.

But Abdulrahman said on Tuesday the army had managed to keep Islamic State out of parts of the complex.

Jazal is a medium-sized field that lies to the northwest of the rebel-held ancient city of Palmyra, part of a region that holds Syria’s main natural gas fields and multi-million-dollar extraction facilities. [Continue reading…]