ISIS, Enslaved Yazidi Women and the 2015 Destruction of Palmyra

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Demolishing’ Syria’s ancient Palmyra temple

In the summer of 2015 two kinds of news came out of the territory held by the Islamic State group (ISIS, also called ISIL or Daesh). One was the ongoing enslavement of thousands of women and children, most of them Yazidis, along with Christians and other minorities from northern Iraq. The other was the deliberate demolition of ancient monuments, culminating in August with the blowing up of the Temple of Baalshamin at Palmyra in Syria. This page brings both stories together, along with what later came to light about a Canadian fund that said it was buying captives' freedom.

What ISIS did to women and children in Iraq

ISIS seized Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city, in June 2014. Christians in the city were told to convert, pay a tax or leave, and most fled. Two months later, on 3 August 2014, the group overran the Sinjar region west of Mosul, the heartland of the Yazidi religious minority. Tens of thousands of Yazidis fled onto Mount Sinjar, where many children and elderly people died of thirst and exposure.

Those who could not escape suffered the worst. In villages such as Kocho, men and older boys were shot, while women and children were taken away. United Nations figures put the number of Yazidis killed at about 5,000 and the number of women and girls abducted and trafficked at around 10,800; an independent household survey published in PLOS Medicine in 2017 gave a lower but still enormous range. Captives were sold in markets, handed to fighters as "rewards" and passed from one owner to another. Boys were forced into training as child soldiers.

This was not a fringe abuse but an organised system, which ISIS openly defended in its own propaganda. In 2016 and 2017, bodies including the US Congress, the European Parliament, the UK House of Commons and a UN commission of inquiry on Syria recognised the campaign against the Yazidis as genocide. In 2021 the UN investigative team in Iraq, UNITAD, reached the same conclusion. Thousands of Yazidis remain missing.

A 2015 rescue fund and the questions it faced

In mid-2015 a Montreal businessman, Steve Maman, attracted wide attention for a crowdfunded effort to free captive Yazidi and Christian women and children. His non-profit, the Liberation of Christian and Yazidi Children of Iraq (CYCI), said it had helped secure the release of 128 people and that it worked through intermediaries rather than handing money to ISIS fighters. Some media called him the "Jewish Schindler", and his GoFundMe appeal raised more than US$580,000.

(The video originally embedded here is no longer available on YouTube.)

Within weeks, serious doubts emerged. According to reporting by VICE News in September 2015:

  • A group of Yazidi leaders and experts asked Maman to provide evidence of the rescues he described.
  • The foundation of Canon Andrew White, the Anglican "Vicar of Baghdad" whom Maman had named as a key partner, said it did not work with CYCI financially or practically.
  • The Canada Revenue Agency confirmed that CYCI was not a registered charity, even though its websites had advertised tax receipts to donors.
  • A Canadian-Israeli volunteer who had once collaborated with Maman said she cut ties over a lack of transparency and documentation.

The crowdfunding page was closed. Maman continued to defend his work, and the full number of people his group actually helped has never been independently verified. The episode is a reminder that well-meaning donors should look for established organisations with clear accounts. The enslavement itself, however, was real and is among the best-documented crimes of the war.

The destruction of the Temple of Baalshamin

ISIS captured the Syrian town of Tadmur and the neighbouring ruins of Palmyra on 21 May 2015. Syrian antiquities staff had managed to move many portable artefacts to Damascus beforehand, but the great stone monuments could not be evacuated.

The temple in better days

Harrowing images show ISIS ‘demolishing’ Syria’s ancient Palmyra temple (PHOTOS)
Temple of Baal Shamin © Joseph Eid / AFP

The Temple of Baalshamin was dedicated to a Semitic sky and weather god. Its earliest phase goes back to the late 2nd century BCE, and it was substantially rebuilt in the 130s CE. A bilingual Greek and Palmyrene inscription records that a local benefactor, Male Agrippa, paid for the work, linking it to the visit of the Roman emperor Hadrian to Palmyra around 129 CE. Before 2015 it was one of the most complete buildings on the site.

On Sunday 23 August 2015, ISIS packed the temple with explosives and detonated them. Syria's antiquities chief, Maamoun Abdulkarim, announced the destruction, and a few days later a French satellite image confirmed that the building had been reduced to rubble. On Tuesday 25 August the group published a sequence of pictures, apparently taken from a video, showing men carrying barrels into the temple, charges fixed to its columns, and the blast itself. Journalists and historians shared them widely on social media.

UNESCO's Director-General at the time, Irina Bokova, condemned the attack in the strongest terms: "Such acts are war crimes and their perpetrators must be accountable for their actions." She described the wider pattern as "cultural cleansing", an attempt to erase the diversity of Syria's past.

Why Palmyra matters

Palmyra lies in an oasis in the Syrian desert, a little over 200 km northeast of Damascus. In the first centuries CE it grew rich on the caravan trade linking the Roman world with Persia, India and China. Its temples, colonnaded streets and tower tombs blend Greco-Roman architecture with local Semitic and Persian traditions, and its inscriptions are written in Greek, Latin and the Aramaic dialect of Palmyrene. Under Queen Zenobia in the 270s CE, the city briefly challenged Rome itself.

European travellers rediscovered and drew the ruins in the 17th and 18th centuries, and their published engravings influenced Neoclassical architecture and design across Europe. UNESCO inscribed the site on its World Heritage List in 1980.

Baalshamin was not the only loss. A week later, on 30 August 2015, ISIS blew up the far larger Temple of Bel, and in October it destroyed the Monumental Arch. Earlier, in June, militants had smashed the Lion of Al-lāt statue and demolished tombs. Syrian government forces retook Palmyra in March 2016; ISIS returned in December 2016 and damaged the Roman theatre and the tetrapylon before being driven out again in 2017.

Khaled al-Asaad, the guardian of Palmyra

Days before the temple fell, the jihadists killed the man who had done more than anyone to protect it. Khaled al-Asaad, born in 1932, had been the site's chief custodian from 1963 until his retirement in 2003, excavating, restoring and publishing on its monuments for decades. When ISIS arrived he had helped evacuate the museum. Militants detained him, interrogated him about where the treasures were hidden, and publicly beheaded him on 18 August 2015, aged 83. His son said he refused to cooperate with the group.

Bokova paid tribute to him bluntly: "They murdered a great man, but they will never silence history." Al-Asaad was posthumously honoured by Syria and had earlier received state honours from Poland, France and Tunisia. His remains were reportedly found in 2021 near Palmyra.

A wider war on heritage

Palmyra was part of a systematic campaign. In Iraq, ISIS destroyed the shrine and mosque traditionally held to be the tomb of the prophet Jonah in Mosul in July 2014. In February 2015 it released video of men smashing statues in the Mosul Museum, and it burned large parts of the city's central library. In March 2015 it began bulldozing and blowing up the Assyrian capital of Nimrud and attacked the ancient city of Hatra.

The group justified this by calling statues and shrines idolatrous, using its extreme interpretation of Islam. Yet destruction was only half the story: smaller antiquities were looted and smuggled abroad to fund the organisation, despite a UN ban on trading cultural objects from Syria.

The people who suffered the most were living communities, not stones. Yazidis, Christians, Shia Muslims, Turkmen and many Sunni Muslims who refused the group's rule lost families, homes and freedom. Remembering the monuments matters because they belong to everyone; remembering the captives matters because many are still waiting for justice.

Sources: Wikipedia: Yazidi genocide (UN figures, PLOS Medicine survey, recognitions); VICE News, September 2015: Key ally distances himself from Montrealer dubbed “Jewish Schindler”; Wikipedia: Temple of Baalshamin; Wikipedia: Khaled al-Asaad; Wikipedia: Destruction of cultural heritage by ISIL; original news report and UNESCO statements via RT; temple photo by Joseph Eid/AFP; embedded posts by Yannis Koutsomitis, News_Executive and Tom Holland on Twitter.

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