Loading ...Syria says militants capture antiquities museum, but art is safe
DAMASCUS — Islamic State fighters broke into the museum of Palmyra last week, though a Syrian official said its artifacts have been removed and are safe. Meanwhile, the US-led coalition conducted airstrikes on the group’s installations near the captured ancient town, in the first such reported attack.
The Department of Defense said in a statement that US-led coalition aircraft had attacked an Islamic State position near Palmyra, which goes by the modern name Tadmur, destroying six antiaircraft artillery systems and an artillery piece.
The Islamic State captured Palmyra in the central Syria province of Homs on Wednesday, raising concerns around the world that the fighters would destroy priceless, 2,000-year-old temples, tombs, and colonnades in the town’s southern section.
The airstrikes would appear to help President Bashar Assad’s embattled forces, which have had a succession of recent defeats to Islamic State and rebel groups. But experts and archeologists said the coalition’s response, days after the city was taken, was too little too late.
‘‘It is like closing the doors after the horses have bolted,’’ said Amr Al-Azm, a former Syrian antiquities official who is a professor at Shawnee State University in Ohio.
A picture circulated on Twitter accounts of Islamic State supporters showed the black flag used by the extremists raised over the town’s hilltop Islamic-era castle, a structure hundreds of years old.
Azm said the castle’s ties to an Islamic civilization may protect it from the kind of destruction the militant group’s members have inflicted on sites that predate the rise of Islam, such as the ancient cities of Hatra and Ninevah in Iraq.
The Islamic State says the ancient relics were destroyed because they promote idolatry, but, it also maintains a lucrative business by excavating and selling such artifacts on the black market, according to antiquities authorities.
One activist in Palmyra, who goes by the name Khaled al-Homsi over security concerns, said a statue in the museum’s foyer — a replica that depicts ancient residents of Palmyra — was smashed by the militants.
Maamoun Abdulkarim, the head of Syria’s Antiquities and Museums Department in Damascus, said militants entered the museum in the town’s center Friday afternoon, locked the doors, and left behind their own guards. He said that the artifacts had already been moved to safety.
‘‘We feel proud as all the museum’s contents were taken to safe areas,’’ he told reporters. But Abdulkarim warned that the Islamic State’s control of the town remains a danger to its archeological sites.
Azm said he doubts that the museum was totally emptied, because larger pieces would be hard to move. He said the museum contained at least two mummies, and carvings from nearby tombs dating to the first, second, and early third centuries.
Azm said he fears that the ‘‘real looting’’ will take place at the site itself, adding that the group will take its time to recruit local antiquities experts to help in running the illicit trade. He is also worried that the Temple of Bel, a majestic structure in the heart of this desert oasis, will ultimately be destroyed.
‘‘It is the poster child of an IS cultural heritage atrocity,’’ he said, noting that the temple in later years was used as a church, and has walls covered in frescos.
Azm said the only way to save the ancient site is by driving the Islamic State forces out of Palmyra.
So far, the Islamic State militants have been primarily concerned with consolidating their control over the city, conducting house-to-house searches for government soldiers and pro-government militiamen, and, in some cases, publicly killing those that they find, according to activists and government officials. They have also partly restored electricity to the town, and urged government employees to return to work.
On Saturday, commercial trucks were allowed to travel to Raqqa, the self-declared capital of the Islamic State in northern Syria, and they returned to Palmyra with fresh produce for the city that has been besieged by the fighting since May 13, Homsi said.
The US Defense Department’s statement didn’t specify where the strikes took place. Activists said they heard of no airstrikes in the immediate vicinity of the town, but battles between Islamic State and government forces have continued in a mountainous area with oil fields northwest of the town.
Aymenn al-Tamimi, a researcher of Islamic militant groups, said the coalition airstrikes technically represent an intervention on behalf of Assad’s regime to expel the group, similar to strikes in the northern province of Deir al-Zour, where Islamic State forces are advancing on a major Syrian military base.
‘‘However, in the end airstrikes don’t mean much if the ground forces are so ineffective in resisting — as has been the case in Palmyra,’’ he said.
The city’s museum and artifacts have been damaged and looted earlier during Syria’s four-year civil war. In a 2014 government report prepared for the UN’s cultural agency, damage already was recorded because of fighting in the area around the Temple Bel. Bullets and shells hit the temple’s columns, while two of its southern columns had collapsed. The report also recorded looting.
Abdulkarim said some 6,300 artifacts from Syria were seized and smuggled out of the country in the last four years.
The Islamic State group holds a large stretch of territory across Syria and neighboring Iraq. In Iraq, police Colonel Aziz al-Shihawi said that Iraqi troops and Shi’ite militias recaptured the town of Husseiba in Anbar province Saturday. He said Iraqi allied forces killed several militants before they withdrew from the town, some 7 kilometers (4 miles) east of the Islamic State-held city of Ramadi.
Baghdad says preparations are underway to launch a wide-scale counteroffensive in Anbar province involving Iranian-backed Shi’ite militias, which have played a key role in defeating the Islamic State group elsewhere in the country. The presence of those militias could, however, fuel sectarian tensions in the Sunni province, where anger and mistrust toward the Shiite-led government runs deep.
El Deeb reported from Beirut. Associated Press writer Sameer N. Yacoub in Baghdad contributed to this report.
Source: www.bostonglobe.com