Islamic State militants beheaded Khaled al-Asaad, 82, a renowned antiquities scholar in the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra and hung his mutilated body on a column in a main square of the historic site because he apparently refused to reveal where valuable artifacts had been moved for safekeeping.
Before the city's capture by Isis, Syrian officials said they moved hundreds of ancient statues to safe locations out of concern they would be destroyed by the militants. Isis was likely to be looking for portable, easily saleable items that are not registered.
Unesco warned last month that looting had been taking place on an "industrial scale". Isis advertises its destruction of sites such as Nimrud in Iraq but says little about the way plundered antiquities help finance its activities. Stolen artefacts make up a significant stream of the group's estimated multi-million dollar revenues, along with oil sales and straightforward taxation and extortion.
Asaad had worked over the past few decades with US, French, German and Swiss archaeological missions on excavations and research in Palmyra's famed 2,000-year-old ruins. "He was a fixture, you can't write about Palmyra's history or anything to do with Palmyrian work without mentioning Khaled Asaad. It's like you can't talk about Egyptology without talking about Howard Carter."
Archaeological experts say Isis took over the already existing practice of illegal excavation and looting, which until 2014 was carried out by various armed groups, or individuals, or the Syrian regime. Isis initially levied 20% taxes on those it "licensed" to excavate but later began to hire its own own archaeologists, digging teams and machinery.
"Their systematic campaign seeks to take us back into pre-history. But they will not succeed."
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2015, @03:05AM
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It is OK to call any people "animals", since it is literally true. But they are also obviously, plainly, uncontroversially "human" in every sense of the word.
Most people who claim to be members of the Islamic State obviously think of their actions as basic survival; they also think of it as a struggle for their personal freedom, and many (although probably not most) think of it as a fight for their political freedom. While you think they are "lower than swine" (in what sense?), they regard the west as a worthy adversary, and these kinds of mentalities must be factoring into why they are still winning and the west got its knickers in a bunch. IS manages to maintain a semi-functioning state, while at war with all of their neighbors, the USA, and its allies, all the while the surrounding regimes are coming apart at the seams. These people have to know quite a bit more about humanity and freedom than you give them credit for. And the sum of all of their atrocities so far is nothing compared with what, mmm, say, USA does every year for the last 40+ years.
~ Anonymous 0x9932FE2729B1D963
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