These executions are far from the only ones that the Islamic State militant group, also known as ISIS, is believed to have carried out in Palmyra, in Syria’s eastern desert.
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Palmyra is a UNESCO world heritage site famous for its 2,000-year-old Roman colonnades, other ruins and priceless artifacts.
The Britain-based Observatory, which collects information from sources on the ground, said the cameras were also installed to help protect the group’s senior figures in the city, who are concerned about informants passing information to its enemies.
The ancient Syrian city of Palmyra. Six statues are shown being hit with sledgehammers while a crowd looks on.The jihadist group said the statues had been seized from a smuggler, who was pictured being whipped as a punishment.
A new report by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has detailed the full scale of the Islamic State’s year of terror, claiming that the group has executed more than 3,000 people in the past 12 months – a tally which includes 74 children.
“An IS checkpoint in [the] Wilyat [region of] Aleppo arrested a person transporting several statues from Palmyra”, the group said in an online statement. “[We] never imagined that [the Islamic State] would come to the town to destroy it”.
“ISIS terrorists have destroyed one of the most important unearthed statues in Syria in terms of quality and weight…it was discovered in 1977 and dates back to the second century A.D.”, Ma’moun Abdul-Karim, director of museums and antiquities, told state-run SANA news agency on Thursday.
On Wednesday, Kurdish forces said they had recovered full control of a town on the Turkish border further north after Islamic State fighters raided its outskirts the day before in preparation for a larger assault.
Isil took it in May, prompting fears that they would attempt to destroy it – as they have with other important archaeological sites in their sweep across Syria and Iraq.
“Extremists don’t destroy heritage as a collateral damage, they target it systematically to strike societies at their core”, Irina Bokova said in a speech at the Chatham House think tank in London.
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Syrians walking in the ancient oasis city of Palmyra on March 14, 2014.
