Via WaPo:
The Islamic State has looted or destroyed a considerable portion of the Tal Ajaja archaeological site in northeastern Syria, according to Agence France-Presse. Khaled Ahmo, director of antiquities in Hasakah province, where the ancient mound is located, told AFP that “more than 40 percent of Tal Ajaja was destroyed or ravaged” by the extremist group’s fighters.
The militants had overrun the area in 2014, but in recent months they were chased out of whole stretches of Hasakah by a campaign led by Kurdish militias. In the wake of the Islamic State’s departure, the extent of the damage the militants have wrought is being steadily discovered.
Tal Ajaja, about 30 miles from the border with Iraq, is one of a series of vast Mesopotamian mounds rich in artifacts and relics going back about three or four millennia. In 2014, video emerged of Islamic State militants smashing Assyrian statues at the site. According to the extremist group’s apocalyptic creed, representations of deities and sites of pre-Islamic worship are worthy of destruction. As the group’s fighters wreaked havoc on the civilian populations caught up in their onslaught, they also pulverized what they could of the region’s supposedly apostate history.
Moreover, as my colleague Loveday Morris detailed last year, the Islamic State — also known as ISIS and ISIL — developed a lucrative, illicit trade in smuggling the antiquities it chose not to smash. This also was the case in Tal Ajaja, where the militants dug tunnels in previously untouched areas of the site and unearthed hitherto unknown treasures — most of which have disappeared.
“They found items that were still buried, statues, columns. We’ve lost many things,” Maamoun Abdulkarim, head of Syria’s antiquities department, told AFP.