IS beheads antiquities scholar
PALMYRA: The beheading by Islamic State jihadists of an “irreplaceable” antiquities scholar, who had spent decades protecting the archaeological treasures in the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra, sparked an international outcry yesterday.
Khaled al-Asaad, 82, was killed by the group after being held for about a month. The militants had apparently tried to extract the locations of valuable artefacts from AlAsaad, but he refused to divulge the information.
Many treasures from the city had been moved to keep them out of the clutches of IS – whose members would seek to destroy or profit from them as they have with sites in Iraq – since the group seized the city in May.
Maamoun Abdulkarim, the head of the Antiquities and Museums Department in Damascus, told Syria’s Sana news agency that AlAsaad was murdered in front of dozens of people on Tuesday in a square outside the town’s museum, and that his body was taken to Palmyra’s archaeological site and hung from one of the Roman columns – although some have said he was hung from a pole. Al-Asaad was said to have been accused by IS of being the “director of idols” and of once representing Syria “at infidel conferences”.
Amr al-Azm, a former antiquities official who ran Syria’s science and conservation laboratories and is now associate professor of Middle Eastern history at Shawnee State University in Ohio, US, said that in many ways Al-Asaad was “Mr Palmyra”. “You couldn’t really do anything in Palmyra unless you went through him,” Professor alAzm said. “He was dedicated to the site and the city and the history of it all… it made him an obvious target for IS.”
There never seemed any danger of Al-Asaad leaving, even after IS swept in, because he saw the Palmyra archaeological site as his life, according to an opposition activist from the town who uses the name Khaled al-Homsi and said he was a nephew of Al-Asaad.
Even when he grew older and could no longer go to the Roman ruins, Al-Asaad “lived close to the site and he could see the archaeological site from his house”, AlHomsi added.
There are fears that IS will completely destroy or loot the 2 000year-old Roman-era city, a Unesco World Heritage Site.
Unesco director-general Irina Bokova was “outraged to learn of the brutal murder”. “They killed him because he would not betray his deep commitment to Palmyra,” she said. “His work will live on far beyond the reach of these extremists. They murdered a great man, but they will never silence history.” – The Independent