Isis’s destruction of Palmyra: ‘The heart has been ripped out of the city'

[zenitzz]

Isis is destroying the ‘Venice of the sands’ piece by piece – and worse atrocities may be yet to come. Will the brutal organisation erase the memory of Syria’s extraordinary history? Plus, Robin Yassin-Kassab assesses the impact on the nation


At length we stood on the end of the col and looked over Palmyra,” wrote the British traveller, archaeologist and poet Gertrude Bell on 20 May 1900. “I wonder if the wide world presents a more singular landscape. It is a mass of columns, ranged into long avenues, grouped into temples, lying broken on the sand or pointing one long solitary finger to Heaven. Beyond them is the immense Temple of Baal; the modern town is built inside it and its rows of columns rise out of a mass of mud roofs. And beyond, all is the desert, sand and white stretches of salt and sand again, with the dust clouds whirling over it and the Euphrates 5 days away. It looks like the white skeleton of a town, standing knee deep in the blown sand.”

Bell, the so-called Queen of the Desert – whom Nicole Kidman plays in a new film directed by Werner Herzog – was entranced by what she saw. She wrote that “the stone used here is a beautiful white limestone that looks like marble and weathers a golden yellow like the Acropolis”. As she rode on a camel into town, she passed the “famous Palmyrene tombs”, “great stone towers, 4 stories [sic] high, some more ruined and some less, standing together in groups or bordering the road … Except Petra, Palmyra is the loveliest thing I have seen in this country.”

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/02/isis-destruction-of-palmyra-syria-heart-been-ripped-out-of-the-city

[Sourgummies]

Its pretty sad to see these places being destroyed. Makes the lines of this war so much clearer when they are showing they can not respect anything. Most likely the point they are making as well.

[Swordsoffreedom]

It's a tragedy that a historical human monument was destroyed rather than being simple stone structures they represent humanity and its history no less a tragedy than if the Roman Colosseum was destroyed, yet this is what ISIS wants a war and to bring the west in for Jihad and to acquire recruits for the Capitulate, that said this is the result of toppling Gadaffi with the second consequence being the wave of immigrants heading for Europe and escaping Syria and other countries like Libya as a result.

[bryant.coleman]

All this will be forgotten very soon. I still remember the hue and cry raised by the mainstream media, when the Bamiyan Buddhas were dynamited and destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. The 3 countries which supported the Taliban (Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates) at that point of time refused to intervene to prevent the destruction, and till now none of these nations have apologized. The incident was forgotten in a matter of a few months, if not weeks.