2009. This organization serves to protect important cultural
sites around the world, but recently Palmyra has lost many his-
torically significant buildings, monuments, and artifacts due to
the Islamic State on a scale much above the control and influ-
ence of UNESCO. ISIS first captured the city in May of 2015
and a month later destroyed two ancient shrines. On August
18, 2015, after holding him as captive for several months, ISIS
killed Palmyran scholar and archaeologist Khaled al-Asaad.
Called by some “the Howard Carter of Palmyra,” Asaad had
a leading role in the excavation and restoration of the city of
Palmyra, and served as the head of antiquities at the museum
there for forty years. When ISIS militants were nearing Palmy-
ra, Assad and other Syrian officials hid hundreds of statues in
safe locations to protect them from destruction or being sold
on the black market. Asaad was taken by ISIS and interrogated
for a month about the location of the hidden artifacts. After
refusing to cooperate and give away their locations, Asaad was
publicly beheaded and his body was hung from a column in the
main square of the city. For many people, sacrificing your life
in the hopes of saving historic artifacts would seem pointless,
but this was Asaad’s life’s work. More importantly, the artifacts
at Palmyra held the stories of thousands of years of people who
lived there, and they were saved because of his belief in their
irreplaceable importance.
In September of 2015 ISIS destroyed the Temple of Ba’al, and
in October they destroyed Triumph’s Arch (Arc du Triomphe).
In March of 2016, Syrian forces retook Palmyra with the aid of
Russian air power and special forces. However, ISIS retook Pal-
myra in December of that year. Over the course of ISIS’s control
of Palmyra, the Tetrapylon, theater, and museum also suffered
enormous amounts of damage.
The destruction of these historic sites occurs at the expense of
local populations, who not only facing the destruction of their
homes and community infrastructure, but also the destruction
of the visual history of their people. UNESCO Director-Gen-
eral Bokova explained the goal of the Islamic State’s destruction
of hi storic sites: “You deprive [the targeted groups] of their cul-
ture, you deprive them of their history, their heritage, and that is
why it goes hand in hand with genocide. Along with the physi-
cal persecution they want to eliminate - to delete - the memory
of these different cultures.” In circumstances where people are
being killed and communities torn apart, most people would
assume that foreign intervention should prioritize humanitarian
assistance and put the task of protecting historic sites as a sec-
ondary priority. However, in these circumstances, supporting a
community’s efforts to protect their heritage is one of the most
important types of international support.
In order to counteract ISIS’s advancements in Syria and Iraq,
the United States led a coalition of air strikes and ground oper-
ations beginning in 2015 that continues on today. As previous
engagements in the Middle East have shown, the United States’
military has not always prioritized the preservation of historic
sites in war zones. Peter van Buren, former US Foreign Service
Officer for the State Department, who worked with the US
Army in Iraq in 2009, recounted that during the 2003 invasion
of Iraq, US Marines built a helicopter pad on the ruins of
Babylon and filled sandbags with crushed pieces of ancient
pottery which are important elements of the archaeological
record. He clarified that while the destruction caused by US
military personnel was much less drastic than the deliberate and
targeted destruction at the hands of the Islamic State, it none-
theless contributed to the loss of cultural heritage in the Middle
East. Another well-known example is the Iraq National Muse-
um, which was looted in 2003, supposedly with the knowledge
or even support of US military forces. Matthew Bogdanos, a
Colonel in the US Marine Corps Reserves, led the investiga-
tions into the looting of the museum and has published a book,
Thieves of Baghdad, detailing his work there. In this book
Bogdanos proposes a four-part strategy to combat antiquities
trafficking. Perhaps the most important part of this strategy is
his proposal to increase cooperation between law enforcement
and the art and archaeological communities. There is not a
need to re-invent the wheel when it comes to saving historic
sites; there are already experts who are familiar with these sites,
with their historical significance, and with methods to continue
to preserve them. What does need to happen is for the knowl-
edge and capabilities of these experts to be utilized.
Many museums played a significant role in raising awareness
for the importance of cultural history and the danger that the
preservation of this history is in. An excellent example of this
approach was the exhibit entitled “Cultures in the Crossfire,”
at the University of Pennsylvania’s Cultural Heritage Center in
Philadelphia until November 26, 2018. The entrance to the ex-
hibit explains the significance of the Middle East to the history
of the world, referring to this area as the “cradle of civilization”
because so many important developments such as agriculture
and writing originated in the Middle East. The entrance includ-
ed a quote from Andre Parrot, a well-known French archaeolo-
gist and the former director of the Louvre Museum, eloquently
explaining the importance of Middle Eastern history: “Every
person has two homelands…his own and Syria.” This exhibit
displayed a lot of the excellent work that is being done by the
Safeguarding the Heritage of Syria and Iraq Project, which aims
to provide training and empowerment to Syrian cultural her-
itage professionals, so that they can work towards saving their
own heritage.
The Penn Museum is not alone in raising awareness about
Middle East History to the public. “Eternal Sites: from Bami-
yan to Palmyra,” displayed from December 14, 2016 to January
9, 2017 at the Grand Palais museum in Paris, utilized footage
taken from drone cameras to create 3-D reconstructions of
Palmyra. In an interview about this museum exhibit, former
Chief of Staff for President Hollande of France, Sylvie Hubac
discussed the urgent need, “For all of us to become aware of the
major disasters that have hit our universal heritage over the last
few years.” This perspective, that the history of the Middle East
belongs to all of us, is necessary if there is going to be advance-
ments made in the global community towards stopping the
destruction of historic sites.
Conclusions
Understanding the way that the Islamic State has used the
destruction of cultural heritage as a weapon of war is essential
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