More Lost Cultural Heritage
By I know that there are bigger issues at play in Syria than destroyed old buildings, but this makes me very, very sad.
“The Assad government’s primary concern is to destroy the rebels, and the opposition’s fighters want to remove Assad from power,” said Ed Husain, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. During the massacre that occurred in Hama in 1982, he added, “Assad’s father bombed mosques. A government that readily kills its own people cannot be expected to respect and preserve historical monuments, bricks and mortar. All is expendable for control of the country. The damage done to the Citadel is one such example.”
The instability in the Middle East over the past 15 years has led to a lot of destroyed cultural artifacts–the Taliban destroying the Buddhas of Bamiyan, the looting in Iraq after the U.S. invasion, recent destruction in Timbuktu and other ancient sites in Mali, and now Syria. This has probably led to the most damage to the world’s cultural heritage since at least the Cultural Revolution, if not World War II.