ISIL Fighters Behead Archaeologist In Palmyra, Official Says

According to the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Mr Asaad was beheaded in the square outside the museum in Palmyra where he had been in charge since the 1960s. Militants then hung his body from a Roman column at an archeological site in Palmyra.

Al Asaad knew that the city that has been ruined would be helpful in heating a shattered country.

“The shrine is located in the oasis 500 meters away from the Ancient City’s Arch of Triumph”, Syria’s antiquities chief, Maamoun Abdulkarim, said in a statement to CNN in June.

Al-Asaad had been held by the IS for about a month, it added.

Khaled al-Asaad, the former director of Palmyra’s historic site and museum, in front of a sarcophagus.

The historian had been a member of President al-Assad’s ruling Baath party since 1954, Khalil Hariri, Asaad’s son-in-law, told The Associated Press.

Al-Asaad’s head was tied to an ancient Roman pole he had placed in Palymra’s center, with a list of the accusations against him, Abdel-Karim said.

The scholar had worked for over 50 years as head of antiquities in Palmyra, prior to the city’s seizure by ISIS. Syrian activists say the group has killed hundreds of residents in the city, which had a pre-civil war population of about 200,000.

Mr al-Azm said that Mr al-Asaad had “acquired a vast corpus of information” about Palmyra, “the kind of information that you get through being there and working with your hands”. Among his titles are “The Palmyra Sculptures“, and “Zenobia, the Queen of Palmyra and the Orient“. The militants have destroyed some of the ruins and artifacts of Palmyra while leaving some of the most prolific Roman ruins intact.

Since taking the site, Islamic State has destroyed several ancient artifacts, which it describes as “manifestations of polytheism”. He refused, they decapitated him and put his remains on display. The statue, discovered in 1975, had stood at the gates of the city’s museum.

In early July, ISIS released a video showing the killing of some 20 captured government soldiers in Palmyra’s amphitheater.

“It was hard for him to see his city under the control of these people, so he insisted on staying there”, Abdalrazzaq Moaz, co-director of cultural heritage initiatives at the American Schools of Oriental Research told the BBC.