conditional comments in IE11

Question

I am trying to use SVG icons from an SVG sprite as DIV background. I have PNG icons to fallback for browsers that don't support SVG. This works with Chrome and Firefox but not IE11 (and Safari). IE11 renders SVG images but not as background of DIV in CSS. IE10 and IE11 don't accept conditional comments. I tried to add X-UA-Compatible META tag ('IE=9') but it does not help. I am looking for a way to have SVG Icons from a "Sprite" and PNG for older browsers. How can this be done without JS? Is there a workaround?