Palmyra Before and After ISIS: Joseph Eid's Photographs

Shocking Pictures Illustrating Syrian Historical Monuments Destroyed By Daesh attacks - Triumph’s Arch

AFP photographer Joseph Eid holds up his earlier photograph of Palmyra's Monumental Arch in front of the spot where it stood, after Syrian government forces retook the city in March 2016.

Palmyra, an oasis city about 215 km north-east of Damascus, was one of the best-preserved ancient cities of the Middle East and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1980. When the Islamic State group (also known as ISIS, ISIL or Daesh) held it between May 2015 and March 2016, its fighters blew up the Temple of Baalshamin, the great Temple of Bel, several tower tombs and the Monumental Arch, and smashed sculptures in the local museum. In August 2015 they also murdered Khaled al-Asaad, the retired head of antiquities who had spent his life studying the site.

After the Syrian army, backed by Russian air power, recaptured the town in late March 2016, AFP photographer Joseph Eid returned with prints of pictures he had reportedly taken there a couple of years earlier. He held each print up against the same view as it looked after the occupation. The results, shown below, are among the clearest records of what was lost. Each photo is followed by a short note on what it shows and why that monument mattered.

Why Palmyra mattered

Palmyra grew rich as a caravan city linking the Roman world with Mesopotamia, Persia and the Silk Road. Its merchants traded across the empire, and its art mixed Greek, Roman, Parthian and local Semitic styles in a way found nowhere else. The city reached its peak in the 260s AD under King Odaenathus, and his widow Zenobia briefly built a Palmyrene Empire that challenged Rome, until Emperor Aurelian took and levelled the city in 273.

What survived into modern times was a whole urban landscape: a colonnaded main street, temples, a theatre, a four-sided monument at a crossroads and hundreds of tombs in the hills. That is why the damage of 2015 to 2017 drew condemnation from UNESCO and from archaeologists worldwide. Islamic State presented the demolitions as a campaign against idolatry, but looting and propaganda value were also part of the motive.

The Temple of Bel: before and after

Shocking Pictures Illustrating Syrian Historical Monuments Destroyed By Daesh attacks - Temple of Bel, destroyed in September 2015

The Temple of Bel was blown up with explosives at the end of August 2015. Satellite images reviewed by the UN on 31 August confirmed that the main building and a row of nearby columns had gone; only the gateway in the background survived. The print shows the sanctuary as it stood for almost two thousand years.

Shocking Pictures Illustrating Syrian Historical Monuments Destroyed By Daesh attacks - The Temple of Bel dated back to 32AD

The temple was dedicated in AD 32 to Bel, the chief god of Palmyra, together with local deities. Over the centuries it served as a pagan sanctuary, a Byzantine church and, from 1132, a mosque, with houses built inside its courtyard until the 1920s. Its long history of reuse is one reason it had survived so well.

Shocking Pictures Illustrating Syrian Historical Monuments Destroyed By Daesh attacks - Security officials at the Temple of Bel

Security personnel walk through the ruined sanctuary in front of the surviving gateway. The print in the photographer's hand shows the courtyard and colonnade before the blast, when visitors could still walk up to the inner shrine.

Shocking Pictures Illustrating Syrian Historical Monuments Destroyed By Daesh attacks - The remains of Temple of Bel’s “Cella”

The cella was the inner shrine of the temple, surrounded by Corinthian columns. Its ceilings carried carvings of the seven planets and the twelve signs of the zodiac. Today the field of broken blocks around the standing gateway is all that remains of it.

Syria's then antiquities director, Maamoun Abdulkarim, was frank about the loss when the site was retaken: “Of course the Temple of Bel will never be the same,” he said. He hoped experts could rebuild part of the cella with UNESCO's help, and appealed to archaeologists everywhere to help, describing the site as part of the heritage of all humanity.

The Monumental Arch and the Temple of Baalshamin

The Monumental Arch, a third-century gateway on Palmyra's main colonnaded street, was blown up in early October 2015. The print shows its carved triple passage against the hill crowned by the later Arab castle. A one-third-scale replica, made by the Institute for Digital Archaeology from 3D data, was shown in London's Trafalgar Square in April 2016.

Shocking Pictures Illustrating Syrian Historical Monuments Destroyed By Daesh attacks - The Temple of Baal Shamin seen used to be visible through these two columns

Two standing columns once framed a view of the Temple of Baalshamin, a first-century sanctuary to a sky god. Islamic State fighters blew up the temple on or around 23 August 2015, a week before the Temple of Bel. The print shows the temple through the same gap; today there is only empty ground.

Shocking Pictures Illustrating Syrian Historical Monuments Destroyed By Daesh attacks - Ruins of a statue in the Palmyra museum

A field of broken stone, cornices and column drums lies around a surviving gateway. Archaeologists later scanned rubble like this block by block, because original stones are needed if any honest reconstruction is ever attempted.

Inside the Palmyra museum

Before Islamic State arrived in May 2015, staff evacuated hundreds of movable objects from the town's museum to Damascus, a rescue carried out at great personal risk. What could not be moved in time, especially heavy funerary sculpture, was deliberately damaged. In June 2015 the fighters also smashed the Lion of Al-lāt, a large limestone statue that once stood outside the museum; it has since been pieced back together and is kept in Damascus.

Smashed statue fragments lie in a heap inside the museum, some already labelled with numbered tags. Conservators sorted pieces like these so that heads, hands and drapery could later be matched and reassembled.

Shocking Pictures Illustrating Syrian Historical Monuments Destroyed By Daesh attacks - Picture taken in the Palymra museum showing defaced sculptures

A broken head lies on the dusty museum floor. Many Palmyrene sculptures were funerary portraits of the city's citizens, carved for family tombs, which makes their faces an unusually personal record of people who lived around 2,000 years ago.

Empty mounting brackets show where reliefs once hung on a museum wall. The small print at the bottom shows the display as it looked before, with portrait busts fixed in rows.

Shocking Pictures Illustrating Syrian Historical Monuments Destroyed By Daesh attacks

Three funerary reliefs with their faces hacked off. Defacing the heads rather than smashing whole pieces was typical of the occupation. Several of these busts were later taken to Rome, where Italian restorers rebuilt missing parts with 3D-printed resin pieces held on by magnets, so the additions can be removed again.

A scorched Arabic-language book lies in ash and debris. Photos from Palmyra after the occupation showed that the damage went beyond ancient monuments to the everyday life of the modern town of Tadmur.

What happened after these photos were taken

The 2016 recapture did not last. Islamic State fighters took Palmyra again in December 2016, and in January 2017 they wrecked most of the Tetrapylon, a group of four monumental platforms at a crossroads, toppling 12 of its 16 columns, and destroyed the front of the Roman theatre. The Syrian army retook the town for the last time on 2 March 2017. Retreating fighters had also blown up parts of the 13th-century castle above the city in 2016.

Plans to rebuild have moved slowly. A French firm scanned the rubble of the Temple of Bel in 2017, and Russia's Hermitage Museum announced a project to restore the Monumental Arch, but that work did not go beyond surveys and inventory. Some Syrian heritage groups warned that rushed reconstruction would serve political propaganda more than scholarship. After the fall of the Assad government in December 2024, UNESCO and partners such as ALIPH and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture began new assessments, though actual restoration was still limited to surveys and damage reports by mid-2026.

Why the record matters

Before-and-after photographs like Joseph Eid's do more than shock. They document exactly which structures were lost, help experts match surviving stones to their original places, and keep the destruction from being quietly forgotten as the war moved on. Palmyra has been on UNESCO's list of World Heritage in Danger since 2013. Whatever is rebuilt there will be partly new; these images show what the original looked like on the day before it disappeared.

Sources: Photographs: Joseph Eid / AFP. Wikipedia: Palmyra; Wikipedia: Temple of Bel; Wikipedia: Destruction of cultural heritage by the Islamic State.

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