Flags are flying at half-mast outside all museums and cultural institutions in Italy today, and the archaeological museum of Milan, housed in a former Benedictine monastery, will change its name to commemorate Khaled Al-Asaad, the Syrian archaeologist murdered at Palmyra by Isil on 18 August.
Italy, which had six archaeological missions in Syria before the outbreak of war, has reacted with particular feeling, but internationally, including the Middle East, social media have been recording the shock and revulsion felt by people everywhere at this barbarous killing of an 81-year-old man, who for 40 years, until 2003, was head of the Syrian antiquities department.
He could not have occupied this position without being a member of the Baath party and close to the Al-Assad family (no relations), but he carried out his duties honourably and fought for better funding of the county’s dingy archaeological museums.
A citizen of Palmyra, Al-Asaad’s special area of research was this beautiful and architecturally influential classical site. He was a specialist in the adaptation of Hellenism to the Syrian context and the transition from pagan antiquity to Christianity. He called his daughter Zenobia after the queen who reigned over Palmyra in its glory days.
Before the town fell to Isil, he was leading the campaign to take hundreds of sculptures from the site to a safe location and, while his family fled in May, he chose to stay.
Isil took him a month ago, and Chris Doyle, the director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding, says a Syrian source told him that he was tortured to reveal the location of the hidden antiquities.
After his head was cut off with a knife in front of a crowd, he was strung up, with a plaque accusing him of loyalty to the Syrian regime, looking after idols, visiting Iran and attending conferences with infidels.
Frederick Fales, who led the Italo-French archaeological campaign in Syria 1994-98, said in an interview with La Stampa newspaper that Al-Asaad was a respected scholar with a strong personality, who “was one of the few Syrian archaeologists to enjoy an international reputation… They killed him because he was there—this was enough of a challenge to the Islamists. And in killing him they hit at three targets. He opposed the destruction of antiquity in the name of a pseudo-religion. He opposed the traffic in illegally excavated finds, and he was associated with the regime of Bashar al Assad”.
“By stringing him up they are launching a warning to the Syrian directorate general of antiquities, which is carrying out an offensive against Isil’s trafficking and says it has recovered 65,000 pieces.
The director general of Unesco, Irina Bokova, said, “I am both saddened and outraged to learn of the brutal murder of Khaled Al-Asaad, who oversaw antiquities at the Unesco World Heritage site at Palmyra… In no uncertain terms I condemn this horrific act.”
Maria Böhmer, Minister of State at the German Federal Foreign Office and chair of the Unesco World Heritage Sites Committee, said, “Palmyra… has been on the Unesco World Heritage List since 1980 and on the List of World Heritage in Danger since 2013. This crime is therefore also an attack on the cultural identity of Syria’s people and humanity as a whole.”
Qasem Abdullah Yehiya killed in Damascus rocket attackThe Director-General of Unesco Irina Bokova was also saddened to learn of the killing of Qasem Abdullah Yehiya. According to the Syrian department of antiquities, Yehiya, the assistant director of laboratories at the department, died in a rocket attack on the citadel of Damascus and the National Museum last week. “The killing of Mr Yehiya is a deplorable act, made all the more senseless by the fact that it was the result of an attack on the museum and ancient citadel,” said Bokova.