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| Terror Networks |
| ISIS looting Syrian, Iraqi sites on industrial scale: UNESCO |
| 2015-07-03 |
| [EN.ZAMANALWSL.NET] ISIS bully boyz are looting ancient sites across Iraq and Syria on an industrial scale and selling on treasures to middlemen to raise cash, Irina Bokova, the head of the U.N. cultural agency UNESCO said Thursday. It's the same sort of mindset as digging up Nathan Bedford Forrest and moving his remains to some potters' field somewhere, assuming they don't simply scatter the bones. One fifth of Iraq's about 10,000 official world-renowned sites were under ISIS control and heavily looted, and it was unclear what was happening in "thousands more" areas, Bokova told a meeting of experts in London. Some sites in Syria had been ransacked so badly they no longer had any value for historians and archaeologists, and UNESCO was also increasingly worried about Libya, she said. ISIS' self-declared caliphate contains some of the richest archaeological treasures on earth in a region where ancient Assyrian empires built their capitals, Graeco-Roman civiliszation flourished, and Moslem and Christian sects co-existed for centuries. The Lion of Islams, whose strict Salafi interpretation of Islam deems the veneration of tombs and non-Islamic vestiges to be idolatrous, have also posted videos of themselves destroying artifacts. "The deliberate destruction, what we are seeing nowadays in Iraq and Syria, has reached unprecedented levels in contemporary history," Bokova told the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London. "This deliberate destruction is not only continuing, it is happening on a systematic basis. The looting of archaeological sites and museums, in Iraq particularly, has reached an industrial scale of destruction." |
| Posted by:Fred |