In their latest affront against humanity, ISIS “bulldozed” the ancient Assyrian city in northern Iraq known as Nimrud with heavy military vehicles. In a move reminiscent of the destruction of the famed Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan by the Taliban, ISIS fighters looted the site prior to destroying the remains of the ancient city. United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization, also known as UNESCO, condemned the destruction of the site as a war crime and released a statement outlining their position early yesterday morning.

“I condemn in the strongest possible manner the destruction of the archaeological site of Nimrud site in Iraq. This is yet another attack against the Iraqi people, reminding us that nothing is safe from the cultural cleansing underway in the country: it targets human lives, minorities, and is marked by the systematic destruction of humanity’s ancient heritage,” said UNESCO Director General Irina Bokova.

I wish that I could say that this is a recent pattern, but alas it is not. You see the Islamo-supremacists have been engaging in this type of behavior since the dawn of their religion. If you consider all of the people in the Middle East today Arab-you would be sadly mistaken but certainly not alone. You see the region has been beset by tribal divisions and violent religion fueled expansionism since they dawn of Islam as explained in a wonderful post called “The Middle East’s Tribal DNA” back in winter of 2008 by Philip Carl Salzman in the Middle East forum.

“Building on the tribal system, Muhammad framed an inclusive structure within which the tribes had a common, God-given identity as Muslims. This imbued the tribes with a common interest and common project. But unification was only possible by extending the basic tribal principle of balanced opposition. This Muhammad did by opposing the Muslim to the infidel, and the dar al-Islam, the land of Islam and peace, to the dar al-harb, the land of the infidels and conflict. He raised balanced opposition to a higher structural level as the new Muslim tribes unified in the face of the infidel enemy. Bedouin raiding became sanctified as an act of religious duty. With every successful battle against unbelievers, more Bedouin joined the umma. Once united, the Bedouin warriors turned outward, teaching the world the meaning of jihad, which some academics today say means only struggle but which, in the context of early Islamic writing and theological debates, was understood as holy war.”

As the Islamic armies would conquer new tribes, they would absorb them into the Islamic population by way of conversion by the sword or intermarriage and instead of being Assyrian, or Sumerian, they became part of the present Arab monoculture that we see today.

The scientists who worked at Nimrud are mourning the loss of human history-not just the loss of Middle Eastern history.

“It’s really called the cradle of Western civilization, that’s why this particular loss is so devastating,” Suzanne Bott, head of heritage conservation for Iraq and Afghanistan at the University of Arizona, who worked at Nimrud, told AP.

“What was left on site was stunning in the information it was able to convey about ancient life,” she added, “People have compared it to [ancient Egyptian] King [Tutankhamun’s] tomb,” Bott said.

According to Jack Green, curator of the Oriental Institute Museum at the University of Chicago, who is an authority on Iraqi antiquities ISIS is intentionally destroying the heritage of the Iraqi people. This is part of a well established trend carried out through the ages by Islamist supremacists since the dawning of the religion. 

“It’s the deliberate destruction of a heritage and its images, intended to erase history and the identity of the people of Iraq, whether in the past or the present,” he said. “And it has a major impact on the heritage of the region.”

This comes one week after the militants blew up an Iraqi museum in Mosul which was the follow up to the demolition of the Mosul Public Library in February. In January they stripped all of the books out of the Central Library in Mosul leaving only Islamic texts.

If that doesn’t show their ultimate intentions I don’t know what else will. The wholesale slaughter or Christians, the threat of “breeding” other blood lines like the Yazidi’s out of the region via rape and forced intermarriage and now the intentional destruction of irreplaceable pieces of human history represented by ancient artifacts. What else will it take for the world to see that ISIS’s intentions, like the Talibans before them are pure evil?