We must go back to pre-Islamic Arabia, where images, statues, and idols were venerated as part of polytheism. Pre-Islamic Arabs would travel to cities to worship their idols in sanctuaries.
Muhammad was a member of the Quraysh tribe, which guarded the sacred Kaaba in Mecca and the idols and images within it. But the prophet’s followers were growing in number, and with them, criticism of idolatry and polytheism—for attributing to an image powers that belong only to Allah. This is considered the gravest sin in Islam (1), since they believed there is only one God, Allah, thus sparking unease among the local tribes, who would travel to the sacred site of Mecca to worship their idols—a practice they feared would be threatened if the Prophet and his followers prevailed.
The first major event in the year 624 was the Battle of Badr (2), near Medina, in which approximately 300 of Muhammad’s followers faced off against about 1,000 members of the Quraysh tribe, who lost the battle; this marked the first turning point in the spread of Islam.
In the year 628, following several battles against the local tribes controlling Mecca, the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah was signed, which settled several issues, including a ten-year truce and permission for the Prophet’s Muslim followers to enter the city the following year for three days (3).
In the year 630, the truce was broken, and Muhammad finally took control of Mecca at the head of some 10,000 men, ordering the destruction of the idols inside the Kaaba, except for the Black Stone (4), which is sacred to Muslims and is currently located on the eastern side of the Kaaba.
On this point, some historians, such as Abu I-Walid al-Azraqui in his book News of Mecca, written in the 9th century, noted that Muhammad also protected an image of the Virgin Mary and her son Jesus, known as Isa to Muslims. In the 21st century, British historian Karen Armstrong echoed al-Azraqui’s account in an article in *The Guardian* (5). As is well known, Mary and Jesus are respected figures in Islam, as evidenced by Sura 19 of the Quran, dedicated to Mary (Maryam).
Daesh considers itself the sole heir to the Prophet’s doctrine
Fourteen centuries later, Daesh, a millenarian terrorist organization, considered itself the exclusive heir to the prophet’s doctrine, applying it in an extremist manner and carrying out a campaign of destruction in the areas it had conquered in Syria and Iraq—including sites that were, in some cases, World Heritage Sites—due to its rejection of the worship of figures which, as mentioned earlier, constituted shirk, or sin, in their view.
The city of Palmyra in Syria, a World Heritage Site, was razed from the time of its occupation in May 2015 until the organization’s defeat in 2017. Among the destroyed heritage sites were the city’s tetrapylon and the Roman theater, which served as the scene of horrific executions of Syrian soldiers at the hands of jihadists (6). Also destroyed in 2015 were the Lion of Al-Lāt—considered a World Heritage Site and restored in October 2017—as well as the city’s Roman Triumphal Arch.
Ten years later, in Spain, in February 2025, the Spanish National Research Council documented the devastation of the ancient city of Palmyra in a report prepared by Spanish and Syrian archaeologists, which detailed severe damage to 12 of the archaeological site’s most important monuments (7).
Palmyra and its citizens suffered particularly severely from this destructive fervor. Among the last to perish was 82-year-old Khaled al-Asaad, director of the city’s museum, an eminent Syrian archaeologist and anthropologist who had dedicated more than 50 years to historical heritage. He was accused of idolatry and of refusing to reveal to Daesh the location of the city’s millennia-old treasures; he was beheaded in August 2015 (8).
The museum suffered not only the destruction of its main monuments but also the looting of some 3,500 architectural artifacts (9). Archaeologist Joanne Farchakh told the newspaper *The Independent* that “The antiquities from Palmyraare already for sale in London. There are Syrian and Iraqi artifacts seized by the Islamic State that are already in Europe. They are no longer in Turkey, where they were first sent; they left Turkey a long time ago” (10).
Building on Suárez-Mansilla’s 2020 research, Dr. Belén Cuenca Abellán, an expert in Arab and Islamic culture and an art historian, notes that, in the period leading up to the conflict, the buying and selling of historical heritage in the Middle East to finance terrorist activities was a recurring practice. However, the illicit trafficking of artworks increased during the years of war with Daesh. The destructive acts targeting artworks—which Cuenca describes as “performative” in order to create a major impact in the media—followed a specific plan of diversion aimed at stealing high-value pieces to fuel the illegal financing of these armed groups.
When asked how this illegal financing through the sale of the region’s artistic heritage could be proven or demonstrated, Cuenca responds:
“The primary source for reconstructing how Daesh systematically plundered archaeological heritage comes from documentation seized by the U.S. Armed Forces during military operations conducted in eastern Syria in 2015. Among the recovered documents, the registry of the Ministry of Natural Resources—known as Diwan al-Rikaz—stands out. It was located following the death of Abu Sayyaf and contained an inventory of more than 550 looted archaeological artifacts. Additionally, documentation was found confirming that these artifacts were transported from the occupied territories to international markets.”
One of the major problems is that most of the objects lacked a prior archaeological inventory, which greatly hindered their identification and restitution. Investigations suggest that the artifacts were sold on the Asian art market (China, Japan, and South Korea) via Turkey, with the group also resorting to extortion and document forgery to introduce the pieces into the legitimate Western market. However, the exact amount of financial gains obtained by Daesh through these activities remains unknown (Suárez-Mansilla, 2020: 312–313).
Mosul, Iraq, suffered a similar fate to Palmyra; the city was occupied in June 2014, and during that time, the so-called caliphate was proclaimed from the Al-Nuri Mosque by the leader of Daesh, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
The city entered a spiral of terror that lasted until July 2017, when—following a brutal, months-long war of attrition between Iraqi forces and Kurdish Peshmerga against the terrorist organization—the last jihadist strongholds in western Mosul were finally taken, though not before the terrorist organization itself blew up the Al-Nuri Mosque. The reconstruction of the mosque, spearheaded by UNESCO, was completed in 2025 (11).
But the destruction was not limited to the mosque. In early 2015, they blew up the city’s library, which housed 8,000 books, and in February of that same year, they released a video showing the city museum, where they were demolishing statues of incalculable historical value with sledgehammers under the pretext of idolatry or shirk (12).
Following the defeat of the terrorist organization, the difficult reconstruction of the city began, particularly in the western part. Among the targets was not only the aforementioned mosque but also the looted Mosul Cultural Museum, which has since been restored with the help of private international foundations and public agencies (13); the museum is scheduled to reopen in late 2026.
But it was not only Daesh; the first Taliban regime in Afghanistan (1996–2001) also attacked cultural heritage it deemed idolatry, destroying the Buddhas of Bamiyan with explosives in 2001 (14), which were carved in the 6th and 7th centuries and represented Buddhist art in that Afghan valley, all in accordance with their most radical interpretation of Islam, which does not recognize any monotheistic religion other than Islam.
The second Taliban regime has not yet gone to such extremes, but they did attack store mannequins, just as Daesh did in Mosul and Raqqa. In 2022, it demanded that shopkeepers cut off the mannequins’ heads, because this goes against Sharia law and they could be worshipped as idols; it reversed the order months later, allowing the mannequins’ heads to be covered with a bag (15).
Conclusions
Daesh has considered itself the sole legitimate heir to the prophet’s doctrine and has reduced to rubble any historical heritage that deviates from the radical Sunni interpretation; it has done so with museums, Shiite mosques, Christian churches, Syrian antiquities, and their temples, and even destroyed Sunni mosques such as the Nabi Yunus Mosque in Mosul in 2014, where the remains of the prophet Jonah were believed to rest and which the terrorist organization deemed a place of heresy (16).
In conclusion, jihadism, in the areas where it has exercised governance, considers the demolition or defacement of images of all kinds—whether historical or even mannequins in clothing stores—to be mandatory due to the danger of shirk, whereas in the vast majority of Muslim countries, there is no general policy of demolishing such images, much less of attacking historical heritage.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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