Khaled al-Asaad was born and died in Palmyra, a site that ranks alongside Pompeii for its beauty and importance.
For half a century, he was the ancient Syrian city’s most dedicated guardian , he held this position for over 40 years – until he was tortured and beheaded by ISIS militants in 2015. .
A poem written about his personal sacrifice, begins as a seemingly silent conscious felt during the internal process of understanding the death he came to.
“The piece began, in part, with the idea of “wonder” — where it comes from, who creates it and who would want to fight it, Akbar said.”
Historian Tom Holland said the news was distressing.
“For anyone interested in the study of the ancient world, it comes as – to put it mildly – a shock to realize that ideologues exist who regard the curating of antiquities and the attendance of international conferences on archaeology ascapital offences.”
On May 13, Daesh (ISIS) began an offensive to invade the city of Palmyra, demanding the location of the city’s most valuable ancient treasures.
In June, ISIS blew up two ancient shrines in Palmyra, which were not part of its Roman-era structures, but which the militants regarded as pagan and sacrilegious.
The city was a connection point between several civilizations, including Rome, Persia, China, and Arabia during the Roman period. After the 17th and 18th centuries, the significance of the ruins of Palmyra were rediscovered, leading to archaeological excavations in the 20th century that made the city famous again.
In early July, it released a video showing the killing of 25 captured government soldiers in the Roman amphitheatre.
Unesco warned last month that looting had been taking place on an “industrial scale”.
During the Roman period, the city reached its height and was adorned with numerous monumental structures including the Temple of Bel, the Temple of Baalshamin, and the Great Colonnade decorating the main street of the city. Outside the city there was also an extensive necropolis.
ISIS advertises its destruction of sites such as,Nimrud in Iraq, but says little about the way plundered antiquities help finance its activities.
Stolen artefacts make up a significant stream of the group’s estimated multi-million dollar revenues, along with oil sales and straightforward taxation and extortion.
Archaeological experts say, ISIS took over the already existing practice of illegal excavation and looting, which until 2014 was carried out by various armed groups, individuals, or the Syrian regime.
Islamic State release pictures after ‘destroying ancient temple’ at Palmyra – Telegraph
ISIS initially levied 20% taxes on those it “licensed” to excavate, but later began to hire its own own archaeologists, digging teams and machinery.
The group invested more, when the US-led coalition began to bomb oil fields and other targets and enforced punishments for looting without a licence.
In May 2015, Tadmur (the modern city of Palmyra) and the adjacent ancient city of Palmyra came under the control of the ISIS.
He himself refused to leave, choosing to remain in his home town.
Khaled al-Asaad helped evacuate the city museum prior to ISIS’s takeover, but he himself was captured by ISIS during that time.
He and his son Walid were detained by ISIS, after the town’s fall on May 21.
Khaled al-Asaad had been held for about a month by the group, which seized the Unesco World Heritage site in May.
He had spent more than five decades leading excavations in the ancient city, uncovering previously-unseen residential areas, tombs and religious sites.
He was then tortured in an attempt to get him to reveal the location of the ancient artefacts , especially gold ,he had helped to hide before being killed.
He was murdered in Tadmur on 18 August 2015 at the age of 83.
After detaining him for weeks, the jihadists dragged him on Tuesday to a public square where a masked swordsman cut off his head in front of a crowd, Mr. Asaad’s relatives said. His blood-soaked body was then suspended with red twine by its wrists from a traffic light, his head resting on the ground between his feet, his glasses still on, according to a photo distributed on social media by Islamic State supporters.
A placard hanging from the waist of his dead body listed al-Asaad’s alleged crimes: being an “apostate”, representing Syria at “infidel conferences”, serving as “the director of idolatry” in Palmyra, visiting “Heretic Iran” and communicating with a brother in the Syrian security services.
His body was reportedly displayed in the new section of Palmyra (Tadmur) and then in the ancient section, whose treasures ISIS had already demolished.
The 81-year-old’s family informed Syria’s director of antiquities Maamoun Abdul Karim that he had been beheaded.
He described Mr Asaad as “one of the most important pioneers in Syrian archaeology in the 20th Century”.
The murder has been denounced as a “horrific act” by Unesco, the UN cultural organisation.
His work will live on far beyond the reach of these extremists,” she said.
“They murdered a great man, but they will never silence history.”
ISIS sees itself as a master in the use of symbols, yet it probably escaped them that Khaled al Asaad, highly respected by his peers, would symbolize the local community’s resistance to the destruction of its heritage and that he would become the world’s most famous Palmyrene after Queen Zenobia .
“They killed him because he would not betray his deep commitment to Palmyra,” Unesco Director General Irina Bokova said in a statement.
The fate of Khaled al Asaad’s son, Walid, is still unknown.
In addition to al-Asaad, Qassem Abdullah Yehya, the Deputy Director of the DGAM Laboratories, also protected the Palmyra site.
He also was killed by ISIL while on duty on 12 August 2015.
He was 37 years old.
‘Stores of gold’
The Syrian state news agency, Sana, and the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that Khaled al Asaad had been beheaded.
Jihadists in Palmyra were looking for “stores of gold” in the city, Mr Karim said, [but] “I deny wholeheartedly that these stores exist”.
Mr Karim described Khaled al Asaad as “a scholar”, while denouncing the presence of Daesh in Palmyra as “a curse and a bad omen” on the city and “every column and every archaeological piece in it”.
Abdalrazzaq Moaz, co-director of cultural heritage initiatives at the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR), told the BBC that Mr Asaad had devoted his entire life to the site and died trying to protect it.
This story is “everybody’s grief,” poet said Kaveh Akbar. Reading about al-Asaad in August, Akbar said he was gripped by the story for weeks.
In his poem “Palmyra,” Akar bears witness to al-Asaad’s legacy and examines the forces that killed him by providing brief, vivid flashes of the scene of his death.
“This poem is an instance where I’m kind of cracking open the window and looking at, for as long as I can bear it, what is physically unbearable,” he said.
[…]
“Here is this man who has spent literally decades preserving artifacts — preserving physical manifestations of human wonder and human awe — and then there are these [people] who are seeking to destroy the history of that wonder that he preserved,” he said.
“Any sincere interrogation of wonder, any celebration of wonder, has to account for those forces that would conspire against it.
ROME – Italy lowered flags to half-staff in all museums and cultural centers of the country to honor Khaled al Asaad, the Syrian archeologist killed and decapitated by ISIS in Palmyra.
The call was made by the Italian Minister of Heritage, Cultural Activity and Tourism, Dario Franceschini, after the appeal launched by ANCI (Associazione Nazionale Comuni Italiani) and its president, the Mayor of Turin, Piero Fassino.
The proposal was quickly successful. “Roma Capitale (the municipality of Rome) adheres to the appeal: museums and cultural institution located in our district will join the mourning.
This is a due initiative to honor the memory of Khaled al Assaad, custodian of Palmyra, and to condemn, once again, ISIS’ crimes, murderous ferocity and barbarity”, announced in a note, the Mayor of Rome Ignazio Marino.
“Museums and cultural institution in all Italian cities show half-staff flags to honor Khaled Al Assaad, as well as express rejection and loathing of ISIS’ murderous ferocity”, was the appeal of Fassino, who had already decided to lower the flags at the cultural centers in Turin.
Silvia Costa, President of the Committee on Culture and Education of the European Parliament, proposed via Twitter to dedicate the International School on Cultural Heritage that Franceschini intends to open in Caserta to the Syrian archaeologist.
The Mayor of Pisa Filippeschi announced that a location “meaningful for the protection of cultural heritage” will be named after al Aasad, who was “a martyr of tolerance and dialogue”.
83-year-old Khaled al Asaad was killed after having refused for a month to reveal to Isis the secret hideouts of antiquities. His mutilated corpse was hung from a Roman column in a square of the historical caravan city, a UNESCO World Heritage site.
He was very much a cultural diplomat, working closely with German, French, Japanese, Italian, and Polish foreign archaeological missions.
His relations were exemplary, always helpful and friendly, but never losing sight of the interests of Syrian antiquities.
His own fieldwork in Palmyra was devoted especially to the late third-century ramparts of the town and funerary monuments scattered in its different necropoles.
He was assistant director to a significant excavation of the collonaded street and agora annexed led by Adnan Bouni, who has been four decades director of the General Directorate of Antiquities and Museum’s excavation department.
Khaled al Asaad participated in all the field seasons of the American mission at Qasr al-Hayr al-Sharqi, an eighth-century castle in the Syrian desert, under the direction of the archaeologist Oleg Grabar.
From the beginning of his career until 2011, he had a collaboration with the Polish mission, directed first by Kasimierz Michałowski and, from 1969, by Michał Gawlikowski.
Two significant discoveries were, in 2001, a cache of 700 silver coins from the seventh century, struck by Persian Sassanid kings Khorsu I and II, invaders of Syria; and two years later, a 70 sq m mosaic dating from the third century, showing a human battling a winged beast amid a decorative panoply of figs, grapes, horses and deer.
He married soon after starting as director of antiquities. He and his wife Hayyat had 11 children—six boys and five girls.
Many were intimately involved with what became the family business of administering Palmyra’s archaeological past. Walid, the eldest, was born in 1969 and trained as an engineer.
Joining the museum staff in the mid-1990s, he succeeded as head of antiquities in 2003, when his father reluctantly retired. Asaad senior continued afterwards in the official post of expert, remaining a daily fixture in the museum and antiquities office.
