The Islamic State and Cultural Heritage : a two-track weaponization María Gómez Landaburu [Recurso electrónico]

Bibliografía: p. 41-44

The systematic campaigns of destruction of culturally renowned sites perpetrated by the Islamic State have been a fundamental component of the terrorist group’s visual imagery, but also of its political and sociological agenda, because in addition to the enormous diffusion that such acts have had in the media and social networks as part of a skillful propaganda campaign, the disappearance of sacred sites linked to the different minorities that inhabited the territories of the caliphate greatly eroded the socio-religious fabric and seriously compromised the intra community ties that had persisted in Syria and Iraq for centuries. The different approaches to this phenomenon of cultural obliteration to date have been based both on interpretations according to a radical iconoclasm of jihadist inspiration, accompanied by an economic interest on account of the illicit trafficking of antiquities, and on an attempt to eradicate the ethnic and religious diversity of the areas under their control.