The Crimes of Palmyra

New York Times

The Islamic State, the ultrafundamentalist group better known as ISIS, has laid a trail of unspeakable horrors in its march through Syria and Iraq — videotaped beheadings, ritualized rape and all manner of grisly torture and murder of anyone who does not subscribe to its extreme version of Islam.

After yet another such atrocity — the recent public beheading of Khalid al-Asaad, 83, the globally respected keeper of the ancient ruins in the Syrian city of Palmyra, for “crimes” like attending “infidel conferences” and serving as “director of idolatry”— it seems somehow disrespectful to bemoan ISIS’ parallel and systematic destruction of historical sites, as if the two were on a par.

Yet it is impossible to read Sunday’s reports of the demolition of one of the best-preserved and grandest relics in the ancient ruins of Palmyra, the Temple of Baalshamin, and not feel anguish at the loss of another irreplaceable monument of our shared past. True, the temple stood near a Roman amphitheater where ISIS is reported to have executed 25 prisoners last month. But to grieve at the loss of a great work of art does not diminish the horror at the loss of human lives, and in tandem they amount to a unified and barbaric attempt to erase not only whole peoples but also their religions, cultures and histories.

As The Times’s Anne Barnard reported on Monday, the destruction of antiquities in Syria and Iraq “has reached staggering levels,” causing an irreversible loss to world heritage and scholarship and filling curators, archaeologists, other experts and lovers of antiquity with dismay. To ISIS, the destruction of the Palmyra temple, like the destruction of ancient statues and monuments in Nimrud, Hatra and other regions under its control, is of a part with the destruction of “apostates,” the decimation of communities like the Assyrian and Yazidi religious minorities, or the enslaving of women, or the beheading of Western hostages: It is an ethnic, religious and cultural cleansing of anything the zealots deem alien to the pure Islamic state.
Such a totalitarian vision is not unique to ISIS. The Mongols led by Hulagu Khan did much the same when they sacked Baghdad in 1258, and in modern times the Nazis and Bolsheviks wreaked enormous havoc on lives and cultures that stood in the way of their ideological goals. But the Islamic State has launched its all-out assault on civilization in our time, and in a region where local authority has been damaged by civil war, and outside powers, notably the United States, have intervened without success.

However daunting the struggles of the Middle East, ISIS stands out in the threat it poses to humanity. But for all its well-publicized atrocities, it is neither all powerful nor immune to military and economic pressures from the West. It can and must be stopped, and the United States and its allies cannot relent in their efforts toward that end.

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