The iconic colonnades and buildings of the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra, which fell to the Islamic State group last week, “will not be harmed,” Abu Laith al-Saoudy, an ISIS military commander in the city, told an anti-regime Syrian radio station. However, he added, statues deemed polytheistic would be completely destroyed.

“Concerning the historic city, we will preserve it and it will not be harmed, God willing … we will not touch them [the monuments] with our bulldozers, as some people tend to believe,” the man, purported to be the ISIS commander, can be heard saying in the audio interview with Alwan FM. “What we will do is break the idols that the infidels used to worship.”

The capture of the ancient city was a key military gain for ISIS and came in the same week as the seizure of Ramadi in Iraq.

The militant group has a history of destroying statues and artifacts it believes to be idolatrous. In February, ISIS had released a video showing its members toppling 3,000-year-old statues in the Mosul museum in Iraq. It also showed the militants attacking these artifacts with power drills, sledgehammers and pickaxes.

The interview with the ISIS’ regional commander coincided with the release of a brief video clip by one of ISIS’ official media wing, showing the largely undamaged 2,000-year-old ruins of the city that have been named as “one of the most important cultural centers of the ancient world” by Unesco. The video also showed the city’s massive Roman theater and the famous Temple of Bel intact.

“They haven’t been damaged and members of the organization told residents that they will not damage the city’s antiquities, but will destroy the idols,” an unnamed activist working for the Local Coordination Committee for Tadmur — the modern name for Palmyra — told the Guardian. “Perhaps it’s because the Palmyra antiquities are mostly columns and large buildings and not statues of people, which they consider idols that must be destroyed, and they have no problem with the other antiquities.”

The Roman theater in Palmyra, meanwhile, is being used by ISIS to carry out executions of pro-regime fighters and civilians, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Earlier this week, at least 20 people were executed in front of a crowd in the theater, which dates back to the second century.

The leadership of al Qaeda has ordered its Syrian branch, the Nusra Front, to not attack targets abroad because that could disrupt its goal of toppling President Bashar al-Assad, the head of the Nusra Front said in a television interview broadcast Wednesday, May 27, according to the New York Times.

The leader, who goes by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, also denied claims by American officials that the Nusra Front contained a secret cell, the Khorasan Group, that was tasked with plotting foreign attacks.

“There is nothing called the Khorasan Group,” Jolani said, adding, “Of course the Americans claim that there are efforts to hit America, that we are a threat to America, but they have not proven anything.”

The hour-long interview, recorded recently by Al Jazeera television in northern Syria, appeared to be an effort by one of Syria’s most powerful rebel factions to market itself to Syrians, and to the wider Arab world.

The interview, the second of Jolani by Al Jazeera during more than four years of conflict in Syria, follows significant losses by the Assad government to rebel factions that include the Nusra Front and to the extremists of the Islamic State, the NYT says.

The two jihadist organizations were a single organization but later split and have become rivals for territory and recruits. While the Islamic State has advertised its brutality and focused on creating a caliphate on land it controls in Syria and Iraq, the Nusra Front has worked closely with other rebel groups and sought to portray itself to Syria’s Sunni Muslims as a just force.

Dressed in a plaid shirt and traditional Syrian vest, with a black cloth over his head to conceal his identity, Jolani tried to further that impression. He said that the front would not harm members of Syria’s Christian and Druze minorities who did not fight against it and that soldiers from Assad’s Alawite sect who surrendered could return to their families. It remained unclear whether such promises were genuine or merely meant to encourage defections.

When a United States-led coalition began bombing Islamic State targets, it also hit bases that American officials said belonged to the Khorasan Group. Analysts who track the Nusra Front were skeptical that the secret cell existed, and American officials have spoken rarely of it since.

An American intelligence official on Wednesday dismissed Jolani’s claims as “self-serving propaganda” but declined to offer specific details.

Just last week, however, Michael Morell, a former CIA deputy director, said the Khorasan Group was “the external operations arm for Al Nusra.” He added: “They are intending to attack Western Europe and the United States. They are a greater threat — direct threat — than is ISIS.”

The Nusra Front’s focus on Syria and willingness to work with groups that received Western support has led many to speculate that it was preparing to split with al Qaeda, perhaps to receive foreign military aid.

Yet Jolani spoke of his group as a part of al Qaeda that received instructions from Ayman al-Zawahri, the Egyptian doctor who succeeded Osama bin Laden at the group’s helm.

Jolani denied that the Nusra Front received support from any government but conceded that it did get donations from individual Muslims who supported its ideology.

He said that Zawahri had instructed the front to work with other groups in Syria who support Islamic rule to overthrow Assad’s government while avoiding external attacks that could jeopardize that goal.

“The instructions that have come to us are not to use the Levant as launching base for external or European groups so that it does not disrupt the battle here,” he said, according to the NYT.

Yet if American strikes on the group continue, he said, “all the options are open, and it is the right of any person to defend himself.”

Two Saudi border guards have been killed and five others wounded by shellfire on the frontier with Yemen, official media reported.

The deaths occurred when “military missiles from Yemen” struck their position at Zahran South in the Asir border region Wednesday, Riyadh’s interior ministry said in a statement carried by the official Saudi Press Agency.

The two dead guards bring to at least 30 the number of people, military and civilian, killed in the Saudi border area since a Riyadh-led coalition began airstrikes against Iran-backed Shiite Houthi rebels in Yemen in late March.

Coalition warplanes have been bombing Houthis and their allies in support of pro-government forces in Yemen.

The air campaign led to deadly skirmishes between the rebels and Saudi forces along the border, but many of the recent Saudi casualties have been civilians killed by cross-border barrages.

Inside Yemen, weeks of fighting between pro- and anti-government forces have killed almost 2,000 people and displaced more than half a million, according to the United Nations.

Al-Manar Wednesday said a group of Islamist militants were killed in a Hezbollah ambush in Syria’s Qalamoun region along the border with Lebanon.

“All members of a group of Nusra militants were killed in an ambush by the resistance” between the Syrian outskirts of the Lebanese towns of Arsal and Nahleh, Hezbollah-run Al-Manar TV said.

It said the jihadi group, spotted by a reconnaissance plane, was planning to carry out a “terrorist attack” from quarries south of Arsal.

Al-Manar said the group belonged to Nusra’s Ghuraba Brigade, adding that a field commander was among those killed.

It said the ambush also destroyed a Nusra military vehicle.

The report comes one day after a security source revealed that six Hezbollah fighters were killed in Qalamoun as they attempted to take the Tallaja hilltop from Nusra militants earlier this week. The source said they were killed in sniper fire Monday.

But Hezbollah managed to take control of two other hills after clashes that left about 30 jihadis dead.

Al-Manar Tuesday aired a report from the outskirts of the Syrian town of Flita, saying that areas surrounding the town had fallen under the total control of Hezbollah and the Syrian army, exposing routes used by jihadis to gunfire.

Monday’s deaths brought the number of Hezbollah fighters killed in the Qalamoun offensive since it began on May 4 to at least 22. The number of jihadi casualties since the start of the operation is unclear, but is likely to be in the hundreds