DAMASCUS, syria — The recapture of Syria’s ancient city of Palmyra from the Islamic State has brought new revelations of the destruction wreaked by the extremists, who decapitated priceless statues and smashed or looted artifacts in the city’s museum.
Experts say they need time to assess the full extent of damage in Palmyra, a UNESCO world heritage site boasting 2,000-year-old Roman-era colonnades and other ruins, which once attracted tens of thousands of tourists every year.
Syrian troops drove the Islamic State out Sunday, about 10 months after the terrorists seized the town.
The world knew through satellite images and Islamic State videos that the militants destroyed the Temple of Bel, which dated to A.D. 32; the Temple of Baalshamin, which was several stories high and fronted by six towering columns; and the Arch of Triumph, which was built under Roman emperor Septimius Severus between A.D. 193 and A.D. 211.
No one knew the extent of the damage inside the museum until a Syrian TV reporter entered Sunday and found the floor littered with shattered statues. A sculpture of the Greek goddess Athena was decapitated, and the museum’s basement appeared to have been dynamited or hit with a shell.
Before Palmyra fell to the Islamic State, authorities were able to relocate more than 400 statues and hundreds of artifacts to safe areas, but larger statues couldn’t be moved, according to the head of antiquities and museums, Maamoun Abdul-Karim.
He said about 20 statues were defaced and others had their heads chopped off. State media had earlier reported that a second-century lion statue, previously thought to have been destroyed, was damaged but could be restored.
Abdul-Karim said he was relieved that many of the statues had only been disfigured and not demolished. “It’s like having a person whose face was burnt. He is not as good looking as he used to be, but he is still alive,” he said.
Amr al-Azm, a former Syrian antiquities official who is now a professor at Shawnee State University in Ohio, was less sanguine.
“The level of destruction and vandalism inside the museum is much more significant than we had realized,” he said. Smashing up statues’ faces “means that there is nothing left,” he added.
