ISIS acknowledges blowing up 2,000-year-old Palmyra’s Baalshamin temple

            A picture of the temple in 2007     (C)ElizabethRoberts

The Islamic State militants have claimed responsibility for blowing up the 2,000-year-old historic ruin in Syria, by releasing footage of how the act was carried out. Maamoun Abdulkarim, Syria's director-general of antiquities and museums, said that sources in Palmyra informed him that ISIS members rigged the temple with large quantities of explosives and detonated them, CNN reports. Captions on the photos claim that ISIS used IEDs, improvised explosive devices, to completely level the temple, which dates back to the first century.

Some statues and artifacts were removed from the temple before the destruction

Balls of smoke rising from the temple after the explosion

Pictures released by ISIS showing how the explosion was carried out

Pictures released by ISIS showing how the explosion was carried out

The demolition of the temple comes less than a week after the observatory said ISIS militants had publicly beheaded the former general manager for antiquities and museums in Palmyra, 82-year-old Khaled al-As’ad.
The director-general of UNESCO, Irina Bokova said in a statement that the destruction of the temple was "a new war crime and an immense loss for the Syrian people and for humanity."