Pádraig Belton

Remembering Khaled al-Asaad, the Syrian archaeologist who dared to stand up to Isis

Erudite and bespectacled, he was the sort of Arab the Islamic State loathed. Khaled al-Asaad, an 81-year old archaeologist, was for the past four decades inseparable from Palmyra’s ancient ruins.

Beheaded in part for his role shielding them from the militants, they strung his headless body up on Graeco-Roman columns he once restored. His remains dangle there still.

On the coat-tails of a pornography of violence which saw the immolation of a captured pilot and the sexual enslavement of a captured aid worker before her murder, Isis still found, somehow, a way to shock.

Four army lorries left Palmyra for Damascus the night before the town fell, evacuating as many objects as possible from its museum, says his friend Dr Abd al-Razzaq Moaz, Syria’s deputy culture minister from 2000 to 2007 and former director of its antiquities and museums. Mr al-Asaad assisted.

‘He had a vast knowledge about Palmyra and its ruins, after being involved in so many aspects of its administration, excavation, and restoration,’ said Dr Amr al-Azm, who worked alongside him in Syria’s General Department of Antiquities and Museums. ‘The first-hand practical information that takes a very long time to gather—and once it’s lost, it’s gone.’

Those who knew him from international scholarly circles are distraught. ‘I feel truly sick about what is going on, and what happened yesterday to him,’ said Dr Ignacio Arce. ‘It is such a tragedy that an 81 year-old man can be executed by these people,’ said Dr Robert Bewley, from Oxford’s Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East programme.

Until late April he continued to write optimistically on Facebook, marking ‘the beginning of spring and renewed life,’ and recalling days when in ancient Palmyra pilgrims would descend in their tens of thousands on a perfumed temple, dressed in their best things.

Palmyra fell on 21 May.

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