Contemporary Political and Religious Extremists as Destroyers of Ancient Artistic Heritage

Abstract

During numerous wars throughout history, warring parties aimed at destroying the cultural and religious treasures of the enemy. The modern age though has brought us a consciousness that such endeavors are harmful. Moral and legal prohibitions have been created on the international level in order to preserve cultural heritages. Yet, we are witnessing now in this age, that these norms are not always respected. Particularly in the Islamic religion militancy of fundamentalism produced a lot of political violence including the destroying of cultural heritage. The most dangerous Islamic terrorist groups today as “Islamic State” and “Boko Haram” use the Jihadism as ideology. Political and religious extremists are especially prone to systematically destroying ancient artistic heritages and to stealing and re-selling valuable artefacts, in order to finance their terrorist activities. This paper is focused on such destructive acts perpetrated by members of the terrorist organization the “Islamic state of Iraq and Levant”, who are currently in control of a territory in Iraq and Syria where 4.000 very valuable archeological sites are located. Following their political and religious principle “let’s destroy everyone else’s past in order to secure future only for true Islam”, they have destroyed a number of precious, thousands of years old archeological monuments, demolished not only churches but also the mosques of their enemies, and burned down numerous archives of priceless historical value. Thereby, smaller ceramic artifacts have usually been stolen and resold, while the larger ones were destroyed.