ISIS beheads archaeologist for disobedience

After a month interrogation by the ISIS, archaeologist Khaled al-Asaad, 82, was on Tuesday beheaded by the Islamic State militants.
The mutilated body of the renowned antiquities scholar in the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra was hung on a column in a main square of the historic site because he apparently refused to reveal to his captors where valuable artefacts had been removed for safekeeping.
The brutal murder of Khaled al-Asaad, 82, is the latest atrocity perpetrated by the extremist jihadi group, which has captured a third of both Syria and neighbouring Iraq and declared a self-styled “caliphate” on the territory it controls. It has also highlighted Isis’s habit of looting and selling antiquities to fund its activities – as well as destroying them.
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Syrian state antiquities chief Maamoun Abdulkarim said that Asaad’s family had informed him that the scholar, who worked for over 50 years as head of antiquities in Palmyra, was killed by Isis on Tuesday.
Asaad had been held for over a month before being murdered. Chris Doyle, director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding, said he had learned from a Syrian source that the archaeologist had been interrogated by ISIS about the location of treasures from Palmyra and had been executed when he refused to cooperate.
Isis captured the city from government forces in May but is not known to have damaged its monumental Roman-era ruins despite a reputation for destroying artefacts they view as idolatrous.
“Just imagine that such a scholar who gave such memorable services to the place and to history would be beheaded … and his corpse still hanging from one of the ancient columns in the centre of a square in Palmyra,” Abdulkarim said. “The continued presence of these criminals in this city is a curse and bad omen on (Palmyra) and every column and every archaeological piece in it.”

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Palmyra-based activists circulated an unverified, gruesome image on social media of Asaad’s beheaded body, tied to a pole on a street in the city.
A board in front of the body set out the charges against him, which accused him of loyalty to the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, maintaining contact with senior regime intelligence and security officials and managing Palmyra’s collection of “idols.”
ISIS, which follows a puritanical interpretation of Islam, considers maintaining such ancient statues to be apostasy.
According to Syrian state news agency Sana and the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Asaad was beheaded in front of dozens of people on Tuesday in a square outside the town’s museum.
His body was then taken to Palmyra’s archaeological site and hung from one of the Roman columns.
Abdulkarim said Asaad was known for several scholarly works published in international archaeological journals on Palmyra, which in antiquity flourished as an important trading hub along the Silk Road. He was a scholar of Aramaic, the lingua franca of the area before the rise of Islam in the 7th century.
-Guardian, UK

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