Erasing Middle East’s long history amounts to a ‘new war crime’

There is a point at which we become almost inured to the latest excesses of Islamic State (IS). After civilian massacres, beheadings, rapes and enslavements of women, the throwing of gay men off buildings . . . we are again shocked and pained by the next atrocity, but the bloody brand has been established. It can’t get any worse. And so the latest barbarity, the torture and beheading of Palmyra’s brave 83-year-old head of antiquities Khalid al-Asaad last week, and the weekend dynamiting of the Temple of Baalshamin, one of Palmyra’s and of the world’s best-preserved first-century temples, is really just more of the same, another variation that serves primarily as a PR stunt to capture headlines across the world by a media savvy organisation.

But although it is perhaps difficult to perceive the archaeological vandalism as akin to mass murder, UNESCO, the United Nations’ cultural body, has rightly described IS’s rampage through Syria and Iraq’s priceless antiquities, an irreplaceable loss of world heritage and obliteration of untold future scholarship, as a “new war crime”.

Syria, one of history’s most important crossroads – Palmyra was an oasis on the Silk Road – contains some 10,000 sites of archaeological interest. After sweeping through much of northern Iraq last year, Isis set its sights on the ruins near its stronghold of Mosul, ransacking museums, the ruins of once-mighty cities like Nimrud and Hatra, and desecrating historic Christian and Shia shrines. In the more populated, western half of Syria, combat and deliberate vandalism have severely damaged some of the world’s most renowned antiquities like the Crusader-era castle Krak des Chevaliers and the medieval citadel of Aleppo. IS took Palmyra in May but had until recent days left its priceless heritage alone.

The destruction of antiquities is an important statement by the organisation about what IS is – it has pledged to destroy only what it deems idolatrous, although it has also been cynically selling stolen antiquities internationally in large quantities to raise funds. Like the Malian Islamists who ransacked Timbuktu’s library and destroyed its mausoleums, and the Taliban in Afghanistan who looted and bombed the Kabul national museum or destroyed unique statues, IS is expressing a particularly extreme, sectarian form of their Sunni faith, one that demands the violent eclipse of all others. Like the brutal Khmer Rouge who reset the clocks to Year Zero, IS is rewriting history by obliterating all other narratives.

But people’s history and culture is precious. The remarkable stories of al-Asaad’s resistance to torture, of the bravery of many museum workers, historians and archivists in the city, as in Timbuktu and Kabul, in rescuing and hiding much of their vulnerable heritage, in the face of certain death if discovered, is testimony to an irradicable spirit that IS will not destroy.