Pillaging, plundering history
In a museum somewhere, there needs to be a plaque paying tribute to Khalid al-Asaad.
Who was Khalid al-Asaad? He was an 83-year-old antiquities expert in the Syrian city of Palmyra. He was taken captive by the marauding barbarians of ISIS, and he refused to tell his captors where antiquities and other treasures were being stored. Once they realized that Asaad would not bend, ISIS beheaded him.
“His blood-soaked body was then suspended with red twine by its wrists from a traffic light…,” according to The New York Times.
The rise of ISIS in parts of Syria and Iraq has been an unrelenting horror show, and Asaad’s brutal death calls attention to two of its most ugly aspects – the group’s penchant for indiscriminate killings, and the equally indiscriminate destruction and looting of rare art and antiquites.
Temples and monasteries that were considered crucially important by archaeologists and historians have been leveled. Artifacts that are centuries old and hold clues to the development of religions and civilizations have been thoughtlessly plundered and trashed. In what could prove to be a small blessing, ISIS has apparently spared some relics from being pulverized into dust by selling them on the black market.
The maneuverings of ISIS don’t have a great deal of impact on our daily lives here in the United States, and it does not pose an existential threat to us. But the group’s actions pose an existential threat to humanity’s history. And, because of this, we are all victims of ISIS.