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4. Much if not most antiquity destruction in Syria has been conducted by groups other than ISIS.

ISIS has, without a doubt, destroyed or damaged many monuments and artifacts. We have sensationalist videos of some cases of destruction, and we know of many, many more instances that were not videotaped. Even so, discussion of the destructive acts has been distorted. First, most reports obscure the nature of ISIS’s targets. While the widespread Western focus on the destruction of structures from sites known from classical and biblical texts (like Palmyra, or Nineveh in Iraq) might suggest that they are the main focus of ISIS’s iconoclasm, most of the monuments that ISIS has destroyed are Islamic shrines and graves.

Second, despite media emphasis on ISIS’s intentional destruction for iconoclastic reasons, other factors have caused large amounts of damage. Many structures — including some of the most significant and iconic monuments of Syria, such as the Great Mosque of Aleppo and the Krak des Chevaliers (a Crusader castle) — have been seriously damaged by combat between Assad’s forces and rebels groups, often before the rise of ISIS. Sites have been seriously damaged by other wartime activities too, including the construction of defensive positions, and the use of ruins for shelter and building material. ISIS does appear to be responsible for the overwhelming majority of cases of destruction for religious reasons in the Syrian war. But even here, they are not the only jihadist group responsible.

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6. Most threats to antiquities don’t come from war at all but from everyday activities.

These activities include normal urban expansion, agriculture (especially plowing fields), and even simple neglect. The damage caused by construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline is a familiar and vivid example, but just one among many. Looting is another routine activity, often unconnected with war. And — as has happened for thousands of years — sites are damaged by people reusing old buildings and monuments as construction material.

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Surveying the reporting on Syrian antiquities over the last six years reveals a parade of errors. But it is noteworthy that most if not all of the errors cut in the same way — to inflate the threat ISIS poses to cultural heritage while ignoring the threat posed by all other armed groups in Syria. Experts have spent years trying to inform journalists of many of the same points I have raised above. They have been largely ignored. According to one expert on antiquities trafficking who wrote on this issue in early 2016:

Editors want to hear about Daesh making millions of dollars from the trade, they do not want to hear that its financial accounting is difficult to know, or that other combatant groups might be profiting too.

What explains this state of affairs?

For one thing, ISIS sells. ISIS has become such a successful bogeyman — far beyond the already significant threat to human life and culture that they pose — that their mere presence in a headline means papers sold and links clicked. After so many years of emphasizing this threat, some media members may naturally assume any claim about it to be true.

But why was ISIS made into a bogeyman in the first place? Here we cannot avoid the fact that it was the threat of ISIS that was used to justify Western military intervention in Syria. We know that ISIS has used cultural heritage as a weapon (having seen its propaganda videos), but other countries, like Russia and the US, use it too. James Peck has written at length about the use of human rights as a weapon of imperialism over the last few decades. Just as the U.S. government has used concern for human rights as justification for military action, so it has appeared to use concern for antiquities to galvanize support for its intervention in the Syrian war. Just as threats to the Yazidis of Sinjar were used to justify the bombing of Syria, so too was the threat ISIS posed to Syria’s cultural heritage.

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