Syria’s government says it has found the remains of an 82-year-old archaeologist who was beheaded by ISIS in 2015 while trying to protect some of Syria’s ancient treasures from the jihadists.
Khaled Asaad’s body was one of three corpses found near the ancient city of Palmyra, according to official media, four years after it was recaptured from ISIS by Syrian government forces.
The terrorists destroyed and desecrated some of the city’s historic remains, but other artefacts were spirited away before ISIS arrived – and Asaad refused to tell the militants where they were hidden.
After weeks of being detained and interrogated by his ISIS captors, Asaad was murdered and his body hung on a column in a main square of the historic site.
Murdered by ISIS: Archaeologist Khaled Asaad, left, was beheaded and his remains paraded on a public square in Palmyra, right, after refusing to tell the militants where historic artefacts from the ancient city were hidden
Syria’s state news agency SANA said the remains of the three people were found in the countryside around six miles east of Palmyra.
DNA tests will be carried out to confirm the identities of the newly-discovered corpses.
Control over Palmyra has changed hands multiple times during Syria’s long-running civil war, with ISIS first capturing the city in 2015 before retaking it in 2016.
Government forces retook the city again in 2017, and ISIS lost their last patch of territory in Syria two years later.
But the damage to Palmyra was already done after ISIS razed historic monuments in what the United Nations described as a war crime.
Syrian government forces have also been accused of war crimes during the long conflict, including chemical attacks on their own population.
Before they retook Palmyra, the landmarks destroyed by ISIS included a 1,800-year-old monumental arch and the facade of an ancient Roman theatre in the city.
Still, some statues and other artefacts were rescued – partly thanks to Asaad’s refusal to give away their location to the militants.
Asaad, a supporter of his near-namesake Bashar al-Assad, had devoted his life to studying Palmyra and was described by official media as an ‘archaeologist martyr’.
The city had flourished in antiquity as an important trading hub along the Silk Road between Europe and the Far East.
Historic city: The ancient city of Palmyra, pictured, has changed hands several times during Syria’s long war, and was under ISIS control for two separate periods
Explosion: ISIS blew up two ancient shrines in Palmyra (one pictured above) that were not part of its Roman-era structures but which the militants regarded as pagan and sacrilegious
A friend of Asaad, antiquities official Maamoun Abdulkarim, said the 82-year-old had refused to leave Palmyra even once the militants closed in.
‘I was born in Palmyra and will stay in Palmyra and will not leave even if costs me my blood,’ Asaad is said to have replied.
Before his ‘execution’, an ISIS militant read out a list of supposed ‘charges’ against him which branded him as a ‘director of idols’ and participant in ‘infidel conferences’.
Asaad’s body was later hung from a pole on a main street, with a paper outlining the ‘charges’ against hung around his waist.
‘He was the head of antiquities in Palmyra for 50 years and had been retired for 13 years,’ Abdulkarim said at the time.
‘He spoke and read Palmyrene, and we would turn to him when we received stolen statues from the police and he would determine if they were real or fake.’
Abdulkarim said at the jihadists were looking for ‘stores of gold’ in the city. ‘I deny wholeheartedly that these stores exist,’ he added.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor, also reported the execution, saying Mr Asaad had been killed in a ‘public square in Palmyra in front of dozens of people’.
ISIS has destroyed other historic sites in Syria and Iraq in the name of an extremist version of Islam which regards the ancient relics as pagan or idolatrous.
The militants are also believed to have sold off looted antiquities, bringing in significant sums of cash.