Ancient Communities Under Attack

ISIS has unleashed a campaign of brutal violence, depraved violence, not only against Shia Muslims and fellow Sunnis who do not share their radical beliefs, but against vulnerable religious and ethnic minorities. Many Americans may not realize that Iraq and Syria are home to dozens of ethnic and religious minorities with ancient cultures with deep roots. These communities-Assyrian and Chaldean Christians, Yezidis, Alawites, and others-are under mortal threat in their ancestral homelands. And the mass execution of men, the enslavement of women and children, and the destruction of religious sites, is part of the ISIS effort to destroy these communities, to destroy all evidence of the preexistence of these communities. ISIS maintains a special battalion. They call it the "demolition battalion." That battalion is charged with going after art and going after artifacts, religious and historic sites that it considers heretical or idolatrous, and their job is simply to destroy history.