ISIS and the art of being heartless

The bomb blast last Friday at a spot less than a mile away from the pyramids reveals how the ISIS has been active in Egypt after the ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood government led by Mohammd Morsi in 2013. Since then the ISIS, already controlling parts of Iraq and Syria, has been gaining currency in the Sinai Peninsula and Egyptian militants loyal to it have killed hundreds of soldiers and policemen. As Morsi faces a death sentence, things are only going to get worse.

The incident brings back memories of what the Taliban did to the centuries-old Buddhas in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, wantonly blowing them up with dynamite. Their reasoning: Islam doesn’t believe in statues.

Or what happened in Baghdad, when the American-led coalition declared the fall of the Saddam regime in April 2003. When widespread rioting and looting broke out, along with wilful destruction of treasures in the National Museum of Iraq, American and other coalition soldiers stood by as invaluable pieces of art, manuscripts and artefacts from ancient Mesopotamian and Islamic cultures were looted, burned, or trashed.

It was the fury of both anti-Saddam Iraqi civilians and anti-social elements as well as the greed of professional thieves. Even the Iraq National Library and National Archives were burned down, destroying thousands of manuscripts from civilisations dating back 7,000 years. But who cared? Art lovers, historians, and academics moaned and groaned for some time; after that it was forgotten.

Rewind to World War II and there are gripping stories of how the Americans helped save artistic treasures of western civilisations, looted from churches and private collections by the Nazis. The 2014 Hollywood movie, The Monuments Men , tells the story of how in 1943, as the allies were successfully driving back the Axis powers (Germany, Japan, Italy), a team of men risk their lives to retrieve treasures that the fleeing Germans have stolen and hidden. Despite European cynicism, the Americans return the treasures, retrieved from mines, castles and greedy Nazis, to their rightful owners.

Against this, we have uncouth, uncultured and uneducated brutes and savages such as the Taliban, and the much more lethal ISIS, wilfully destroying ancient treasures with not a whimper from anybody.

In April, the Islamic State released a shocking video of how ISIS used power tools and bulldozers to deface and destroy ancient monuments in the Assyrian city of Nimrud in northern Iraq.

The terrorists used power drills and sledgehammers to deface intricate carvings, break priceless stone friezes, some dating back to over 3,000 years, before levelling the entire site to dust with powerful explosives. All because the ISIS believes these to be “un-Islamic and blasphemous”.

One desperately wishes there was somebody out there strong and powerful enough to effectively challenge the ISIS on whether what they are doing, using women as sex slaves, is Islamic. Which sura in the Quran, or which section of the Hadith, sanctions this?

There are any number of bloodcurdling stories of ISIS brides, and most of those that have come into the public domain are from countries such as the UK from where schoolgirls as young as 15 have been lured and brainwashed by ISIS militants to leave their homes in search of some promised wonderland.

But once they cross the border either into Iraq or Syria, mainly via Turkey, horrors unfold; after being used as sex slaves, some have managed to escape.

Then there are stories of young Yazidi women — the Yazidis are a religious minority inhabiting the mountains of northwest Iraq and denounced by Muslims as “devil worshippers” who fled Iraq last year following atrocities against them. The terrorists captured many Yazidi women and turned them into ‘ISIS brides’, a euphemism for sex slaves. A few who escaped have related stories of unimaginable torture, being tied, gangraped, raped five times a day by the same man, and so on.

Flown to the UK by a charity, these women told their stories hoping to dissuade impressionable young Muslim girls from getting trapped in ISIS talk, through the net of course.

As Syrians flee their country in a deluge, caught in the crossfire between Assad, ISIS and an array of rebel groups, the powerful countries do little more than pay lip service. For a much lesser cause, or no cause at all, Iraq was attacked in 2003 by US-led forces and has been reduced to this sorry state, parts of it being subjected to the brutalities of perhaps the most evil force the modern world has seen.