The war in Syria has displaced more than half the population, almost half a million Syrians have been killed and has fueled the greatest refugee crisis since WWII.
The conflict is also striking at the heart of Syria’s identity; it is a country with a long rich cultural history which, in some sense, belongs to all of us. Syria is the birth place of human civilization. Aleppo is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world,
ISIS has attacked archaeological sites, including the famous ancient city of Palmyra, with bulldozers and explosives. Bombing, looting, and illegal excavation have wreaked further havoc. Palmyra is one of six UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Syria. All have been damaged or destroyed.
“Syrians are identified by their cultural heritage. Cultural heritage is one of the few areas that Syrians still agree across this terrible divide that has ruptured their society,” Amr al-Azm, associate professor of history and anthropology at Shawnee State University in Ohio, told Midday.
“With the cultural heritage, it’s one of the few ways that we can use to reach across this divide and maybe still be able to communicate with each other once this conflict is over,” al-Azm – who manages the Heritage Protection Initiative for ‘The Day After’, an organization dedicated to planning a transition from the current Assad regime in Syria – continued.
“For me, saving Syria’s cultural heritage is about saving Syria’s future too,” he said, adding that “people without their cultural heritage are a lost people; they have no identity.”
“Considering this conflict will end someday, as all conflicts do, we are going to have to find some common denominator to begin to communicate with each other about… and I think cultural heritage can really play a vital role and that is why it is so important to preserve it beginning from now.”
Glenn Schwartz – Whiting Professor of Archaeology at Johns Hopkins University and Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Studies – stated that Syria’s archaeological heritage “is probably one of the richest in the world… when people began to settle down, that happened for the first time in Syria. So Syria has one of the oldest records of settled life. So it goes back to 12,000 or 10,000 BC.”
Schwartz added that the rise of human urban life also took place in Syria. “There is a record of buildings that date back hundreds, even thousands of years that still have been standing in Syrian cities.”
Al-Azm added that “these are not just dead archaeological sites, rather living with real human contact. You think of sites like Bosra where the ancient city of Bosra and the modern houses, town and village are intermingled amongst each other. You think of cities like Aleppo and Damascus where all the old meet. Some [popular markets] in Aleppo date back to the 12[sup]th[/sup] century and where still, until the conflict, were used as real markets.”
“The looting is as old as the history of the region, even senior members of the [Assad] regime were often implicated in the looting of antiquities but with the shift of the conflict from peaceful protest and civil activism to an on confrontation between the regime and opposition, that is when we see this huge increase in damage to Syria’s cultural heritage; it becomes a battlefield causality,” he explained.
“More importantly it becomes a causality of looting; large swaths of Syria are no longer under any sort of governance, so these archaeological sites just become free for all.”
With the emergence of ISIS, “they institutionalize the process of looting; they make it part of the state’s source of revenue,” he added.
“Obviously the situation is very dire, but there are people who are doing their best, trying very hard to document the damage.”
He further stated that “the regime has definitely been derelict in its duty to protect its cultural heritage, it has indiscriminately bombarded, rocketed and fired upon sites that are world heritage sites… The KraK des Chevaliers was heavily damaged by regime air strikes and bombardment… The burning of the souks of Aleppo in 2012 is another example of the destruction by the regime.”
“And now we have the Russian with their indiscriminate bombardment. They have bombed, for example, the site of Shansharah which is part of the World Heritage designated sites of the dead cities, they have bombed Ebla about a month and a half ago and even now in Palmyra… They [Russians] have sited a military base right in the middle of the archaeological site and it’s clearly for combat operations,” he said.
He further explained that “heavy tracked vehicles driving around an archaeological site can do incredible damage to the site. The crushing effect of the vehicles, the vibrations, it’s just going to destroy everything that is left and it is sited right in the middle of the archaeological site.”
“ISIS has a special brand of destruction. ISIS sees cultural heritage as a resource; an exploitable resource. It loots what it can sell and destroys what it can for propaganda purpose. It uses what is left for either as safe havens or bases for its forces or they use it for oil instillation. They know that these sites are not going to be struck by the coalition. So they use these sites in a multitude of different ways. For me that is why ISIS is probably the most destructive because they really have taken the exploitation of cultural heritage to a new level.”
