Shortly after conquering Palmyra, on 27 May, ISIS released an eighty-seven-second video message promising to preserve the Roman ruins. That did not prevent ISIS a month later from initiating the systematic destruction of the graceful colonnades that stretched into the desert for nearly a mile along the ancient Roman road. Militants smashed the famed Lion of al-Lāt, a beautiful stone statue of a lion god protecting a gazelle that Polish archaeologist Michał Gawlikowski discovered only in 1977. Subsequent reports from Palmyra were vague about what was happening. Then, in late August, satellite photographs confirmed that ISIS had razed the site’s most impressive structures, the Roman-era Temples of Baalshamin and Bel. UNSECO head Irina Bokova called ISIS’s vandalism a ‘war crime’ and an ‘intolerable crime against civilisation’. ISIS followed those outrages with the destruction of Palmyra’s distinctive funeral towers that had stood for centuries at the fringe of the old city. If the jihadists stayed much longer, archaeologists feared, nothing would remain.

Thank you for funding these head choppers, USG