ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

LONDON: ISIS militants are looting ancient sites across Iraq andSyria on an industrial scale and selling on treasures to middlemen to raise cash, Irina Bokova, the head of the U.N. cultural agencyUNESCO said Thursday. One fifth of Iraq's about 10,000 official world-renowned sites were under ISIS control and heavily looted, and it was unclear what was happening in "thousands more" areas, Bokova told a meeting of experts in London. Some sites in Syria had been ransacked so badly they no longer had any value for historians and archaeologists, and UNESCO was also increasingly worried about Libya, she said. ISIS' self-declared caliphate contains some of the richest archaeological treasures on earth in a region where ancient Assyrian empires built their capitals, Graeco-Roman civiliszation flourished, and Muslim and Christian sects co-existed for centuries. The militants, whose strict Salafi interpretation of Islam deems the veneration of tombs and non-Islamic vestiges to b...

An ISIS fighter reads out a death sentence in front of 25 Syrian soldiers in the site of the amphitheater in Palmyra, Syria (Video grab) The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria on Saturday released a grisly video showing 25 Syrian government soldiers being executed by teenagers in the ancient amphitheater in the city of Palmyra. The video documented an execution that reportedly happened shortly after the group captured the city on May 21. A crowd look on as the death sentence is read to the 25 Syrian soldiers in the ancient Palmyra amphitheater (Video grab) The 10-minute clip, which begins with a recitation of the Quran, then cuts to shots of the conflict, and then chained-together soldiers being led out of a cell onto a courtyard. The captives are then transported by a convoy of pickup trucks to the site of the Palmyra ruins, where they are made to kneel in a line in the amphitheater. A man waves an ISIS flag as the crowd look on (Video grab) As the death s...

This was posted by Anonymous source ALEPPO, SYRIA: We didn't sleep all the night. The attacks of yesterday 2nd July started around afternoon and continued up till today 8:30 am 3rd July. They said that 3-4 civilians died, but 87 civilians injured. The ambulance voices didn't stop all night long. You had to hear the people over here in Aleppo. Aren't they Syrians? After all these years and after all these attacks on them and after they lost their income sources and family members, they are asking the Syrian army to terminate the terrorist attackers and their nests, which have become like cancer in Syria's body. They don't care if that termination happens by chemical weapons, bombs, or whatever. Yet, around the world and in the mainstream media, they dare to demonize the Syrian Army with the so-called "barrel bombs" and refer to dead terrorists as peaceful moderate Syrian opposition who had been killed by dictator! I don't swear, and I'm fasting this...