Islamic State (IS) militants beheaded an antiquities scholar in the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra and hung his body on a column in a main square of the historic site, Syria's antiquities chief said on Tuesday.Barbarians.
IS, whose insurgents control swathes of Syria and Iraq, captured Palmyra in central Syria from government forces in May, but are not known to have damaged its monumental Roman-era ruins despite their reputation for destroying artifacts they view as idolatrous under their puritanical interpretation of Islam.
Syrian state antiquities chief Maamoun Abdulkarim said the family of Khaled Asaad had informed him that the 82-year-old scholar who worked for over 50 years as head of antiquities in Palmyra was executed by Islamic State on Tuesday.
Asaad had been detained and interrogated for over a month by the ultra-radical Sunni Muslim militants, he told Reuters.
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Background on Palmyra and its fate in the hands of ISIS is here and links. This is not the first time they have used the ruins at the site for execution theatre. And more on ISIS's assault on the past — and its representatives — is here and here and links.
UPDATE: The ASOR Blog has some additional background on the actions of ISIS: Iconoclasm in the ‘Islamic State’ (Lucinda Dirven). (Requires free registration to read in full.)