ISIS destroys ancient temple

Bassem Mroue has an Associated Press article in Time about more ISIS destruction:

Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) militants have destroyed a temple (photo) at Syria’s ancient ruins of Palmyra, activists said, realizing the worst fears archaeologists had for the two-thousand-year-old Roman-era city after the extremists seized it and beheaded a local scholar.
Palmyra, one of the Middle East’s most spectacular archaeological sites and a UNESCO World Heritage site, sits near the modern Syrian city of the same name. Activists said the militants used explosives to blow up the Baalshamin Temple on its grounds, the blast so powerful it also damaged some of the Roman columns around it.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Sunday night that the temple was blown up a month ago. Turkey-based activist Osama al-Khatib, who is originally from Palmyra, said the temple was blown up on Sunday. Both said the extremists used a large amount of explosives to destroy it.
Both activists relied on information for those still in Palmyra and the discrepancy in their accounts could not be immediately reconciled, though such contradictory information is common in Syria’s long civil war.
The fate of the nearby Temple of Bel, dedicated to the Semitic god Bel, was not immediately known. ISIS group supporters on social media also did not immediately mention the temple’s destruction.
The Sunni extremists, who have imposed a violent interpretation of Islamic law across their self-declared caliphate in territory they control in Syria and Iraq, claim ancient relics promote idolatry, and say they are destroying them as part of their purge of paganism. However, they are also believed to sell off looted antiquities, bringing in significant sums of cash.
al-Khatib said the Baalshamin Temple is about five hundred meters from Palmyra’s famous amphitheater where the group killed more than tweht6 Syrian soldiers after they captured the historic town in May of 2015. The temple dates to the first century and is dedicated to the Phoenician god of storms and fertilizing rains.
The head of UNESCO, Irina Bokova, said that Islamic State extremists in Syria and Iraq are engaged in the “most brutal, systematic” destruction of ancient sites since World War Two, a stark warning that came hours after militants demolished the St. Elian Monastery, which housed a fifth-century tomb and served as a major pilgrimage site. The monastery was in the town of Qaryatain in central Syria.
News of the temples destruction comes after relatives and witnesses said that Khaled al-Asaad, an eighty-year-old antiquities scholar who devoted his life to understanding Palmyra, was beheaded by ISIS militants, his bloodied body hung on a pole. He even had named his daughter after Zenobia, the queen that ruled from the city seventeen hundred years ago.
Meanwhile, in Iraq, at least twenty soldiers and government-allied militiamen were killed Sunday in an attack by ISIS militants in the turbulent Anbar province west of Baghdad, Iraqi military and police officials said, in the second heavy death toll suffered by the Iraqi military and its allies in recent days in the vast Sunni region.
The officials said the attack, which killed seventeen soldiers and six Sunni militia fighters, took place in the rural district of Jaramshah, north of Anbar’s provincial capital, Ramadi. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to journalists. They said the ISIS fighters used suicide bombings and mortar shells and that the chief of army operations in Anbar, Major General Qassim al-Dulaimi, was lightly wounded in the attack.
News of the attack came two days after up to fifty soldiers were killed by ISIS in two ambushes elsewhere in Anbar province, much of which is under militant control, including Ramadi and the key city of Fallujah.
Government forces and allied Sunni and Shi'ite militiamen have been battling ISIS militants in Anbar for months, but, hampered by suicide bombings and booby-trapped buildings, they have only made modest gains.

Rico says they better not show up in Palmyra, New Jersey; he knows at least one heavily-armed local who'd take out a bunch of them...