Globe Trot: ISIS attempts to rewrite history by pillaging Iraq's museums

ISIS has released a video showing its fighters smashing ancient artifacts in Mosul Museum. Now we may be thankful collections of similar artifacts from ancient Nineveh reside in the British Museum and the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute. Austen Henry Layard, the 19th century archaeologist who uncovered the ancient city of Nimrud, wrote a detailed history of the efforts by Westerners and Arabs, Nineveh and Its Remains.

What radicalized “Jihadi John”—the Islamic State decapitator now identified by The Washington Post as Mohammed Emwazi, a Kuwaiti-born Londoner—can’t be explained by Britain’s “suffocating domestic policies” against Islamists. Or by poverty and injustice, as Emwazi has a middle-class, educated background.

SYRIA: Church leaders I’ve talked to over the last few days believe ISIS has captured more than 300 Assyrian Christians from the villages along the Khabur River, and have forced more than 1,200 survivors of the terrorist attacks to flee (pictured below seeking refuge in churches at the Syria-Iraq border). Christian militia members, including women, who tried to protect their villages have been beheaded, and a number of women and children are among the captives.

CHINA: Targeting religious communities for repression undermines the state, argues Katrina Lantos Swett, chairwoman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.

AFGHANISTAN: Sharbat Bibi, whose iconic photograph appeared on the cover of National Geographic magazine in 1985 when she was 12, has surfaced again, this time for apparently trying to obtain false documents to remain in Pakistan.

ARGENTINA: A federal judge has dismissed allegations against President Cristina Kirchner that claim she plotted with Iran to cover up its role in a 1994 terrorist attack in Buenos Aires. The ruling may be appealed.

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