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Islamic State Blows Up Ancient Temple at Syria’s Palmyra Ruins ISIS Blows Up Ancient Temple at Syria’s Palmyra Ruins
(about 2 hours later)
BEIRUT — Islamic State militants have destroyed a temple at the ancient ruins of Palmyra in Syria, activists said on Sunday, realizing one of archaeologists’ worst fears for the 2,000-year-old Roman-era city after the extremists seized it and beheaded a local scholar. Militants from the Islamic State destroyed a temple in the ancient ruins of Palmyra in Syria, activists and government officials said on Sunday, continuing a pattern of destruction that they have visited upon historical sites across the territory they control there and in Iraq.
Palmyra, one of the Middle East’s most spectacular archaeological sites and a Unesco World Heritage site, sits near the modern Syrian city of the same name. Activists said that the militants used explosives to blow up the Baalshamin Temple on its sprawling grounds, and that the blast was so powerful it also damaged some of the Roman columns around it. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an activist and monitoring group based in Britain, said Sunday in a statement that Islamic State fighters detonated “a large quantity of explosives” that they had arranged around the Temple of Baalshamin, one of the most grand and well-preserved structures in the sprawling complex of ruins. A government official told reporters that it was heavily damaged by the blast.
When the destruction occurred was unclear. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Sunday night that the temple was blown up a month ago. An activist based in Turkey, Osama al-Khatib, who is from Palmyra, said the temple was blown up on Sunday. Both relied on information from those still in Palmyra, and the discrepancy in their accounts could not be immediately reconciled. The temple stood “dozens of meters” away from a Roman amphitheater where the Islamic State held a mass execution, killing 25 prisoners, in a video released last month, the activist group said. The entire ancient city of Palmyra is a Unesco World Heritage site.
The Sunni extremists, who have imposed a violent interpretation of Islamic law across territory they control in Syria and Iraq, claim ancient relics promote idolatry and say that they are destroying them as part of their purge of paganism. However, it is also believed that they sell off looted antiquities, bringing in significant sums of cash. Maamoun Abdul-Karim, the head of Syria’s Directorate of Antiquities and Museums, confirmed the activists’ account to Reuters, although the two accounts differed on when the temple was destroyed. The Syrian Observatory said the destruction took place last month, while Dr. Abdul-Karim said the militants bombed it on Sunday.
Mr. Khatib said the Baalshamin Temple is about 550 yards from Palmyra’s famous amphitheater, where the group killed more than 20 Syrian soldiers after it captured the historic town in May. The reason for the discrepancy between the accounts was not clear, although such disagreements are not uncommon, given the hazy nature of Syria’s long-running civil war.
The temple dates to the first century and is dedicated to the Phoenician god of storms and fertilizing rains. “I am seeing Palmyra being destroyed in front of my eyes,” Dr. Abdul-Karim told Reuters. “God help us in the days to come.”
The head of Unesco, Irina Bokova, said on Friday that Islamic State extremists in Syria and Iraq were engaged in the “most brutal, systematic” destruction of ancient sites since World War II, a stark warning that came hours after militants demolished the St. Elian Monastery, in central Syria, which housed a fifth-century tomb and served as a major pilgrimage site. Dr. Abdul-Karim said he was unsurprised to hear that the Islamic State had destroyed a temple.
Last week Khalid al-Asaad, 81, the retired chief of antiquities for Palmyra, was beheaded by Islamic State militants, and his body was then suspended with red twine by its wrists from a traffic light. “We have said repeatedly the next phase would be one of terrorizing people, and when they have time they will begin destroying temples,” he said.
The destruction of the temple is just the latest in a string of horrors that the Islamic State has inflicted upon Palmyra since seizing the city in May. Last week, the group beheaded Khalid al-Asaad, 83, who had served as the chief of the city’s antiquities department for more than 50 years. After they killed him, Islamic State militants strung his headless body as a warning to others. Last month, the group demolished half a dozen ancient statues, smashing them with sledge hammers, and in June they blew up two historic tombs.
The Syrian government rushed to bring as many antiquities as possible from the city to the relative safety of Damascus before it fell to the Islamic State, but left behind many more of the city’s archaeological treasures, not to mention thousands of its residents.
Members of the Islamic State consider artifacts that date from before the birth of Islam to be symbols of paganism that must be destroyed, although they have in the past sold some of the more valuable ones that fall under their control as a way to help finance operations.
The Temple of Baalshamin was built more than 2,000 years ago and was dedicated to the Phoenician god Baalshamin.