the city led to the destruction or removal of much of the archaeological remains of the city's past. The palace area is now almost covered with settlements, as is the former area of the ancient al-Raqqa (today Mishlab) and the former Abbasid industrial district (today al-Mukhtalţa). Only parts were archaeologically explored. The 12th-century citadel was removed in the 1950s (today Dawwār as-Sā'a, the clock-tower circle). In the 1980s, rescue excavations in the palace area began, as well as the conservation of the Abbasid city walls with the Bāb Baghdād and the two main monuments intra muros, the Abbasid mosque and the Qasr al-Banāt. Syrian civil war In March 2013, during the Syrian Civil War, Islamist jihadist militants from Al-Nusra Front, Ahrar al-Sham, the Free Syrian Army, and other groups overran the government loyalists in the city during the Battle of Raqqa (2013) and declared it under their control, after they had taken the central square and pulled down the statue of the former president of Syria, Hafez al-Assad. Raqqa was the first provincial capital to fall to the Syrian rebels. The Al Qaeda-affiliated Al-Nusra Front set up a sharia court at the sports centre and in early June 2013, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant said that it was open to receive complaints at its Raqqa headquarters. Migrations Migration from Aleppo, Homs, Idlib and other inhabited places to the city occurred as a result of the ongoing civil war in the country, and Raqqa was known as the hotel of the revolution by some because of the number of people who moved there. De facto capital of the Islamic State (January 2014–October 2017) ISIL took complete control of Raqqa by 13 January 2014. ISIL proceeded to execute Alawites and suspected supporters of Bashar al-Assad in the city and destroyed the city's Shia mosques and Christian churches such as the Armenian Catholic Church of the Martyrs, which was then converted into an ISIL police headquarters and an Islamic centre, tasked to recruit new fighters. The Christian population of Raqqa, which had been estimated to be as much as 10% of the total population before the civil war began, largely fled the city. On 15 November 2015, France, in response to attacks in Paris two days earlier, dropped about 20 bombs on multiple ISIL targets in Raqqa. Pro-government sources said that an anti-IS uprising took place between 5 and 7