Destroying history, the extremists not only kill innocent people
“Muslim extremists target world’s priceless treasures”
By The Muslim Post (edited) (was first posted in China Daily)

Muslim extremists target world’s priceless treasures

20 August 2016
From Mali to Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq, extremist fighters have regularly turned their sights on the priceless vestiges of peoples’ cultural heritage – for being un-Islamic.
The following are some examples of world cultural heritage destroyed or damaged during recent conflicts. More damage done in other locations,

Mali
The fabled desert city of Timbuktu, named as the “City of 333 saints” and listed by UNESCO, was for months attacked by extremists bent on imposing a brutal version of Islamic law.
In June 2012, al-Qaida-linked militants destroyed 14 of the northern city’s mausoleums, important buildings that date back to Timbuktu’s golden age in the 15th and 16th centuries as an economic, intellectual and spiritual hub.

Syria
More than 900 monuments or archaeological sites have been looted, damaged or destroyed in Syria, where a devastating war has raged since 2011. In September 2015, Islamic State fighters destroyed two of the most important temples in the UNESCO-listed Syrian city of Palmyra as they pressed a campaign to wipe out some of the Middle East’s most important heritage sites.

Iraq
The IS group has carried out a campaign of “cultural cleansing”, razing part of ancient Mesopotamia’s relics and looting others to sell valued artifactsfacts on the black market.
In a video released by the IS group on Feb 26, 2015, militants were shown using sledgehammers to smash pre-Islamic treasures in the museum in the country’s second city Mosul, sparking global outrage.
Thousands of books and rare manuscripts were also burned in February in Mosul’s library.

Libya
Several mausoleums have been destroyed by Islamic extremists since the overthrow of longtime dictator Muammar Gadhafi in 2011.
In August 2012, Islamist hardliners bulldozed part of the mausoleum of Al-Shaab Al-Dahman, close to the center of the Libyan capital.

Afghanistan
In March 2001, Taliban leader Mullah Omar ordered the destruction of two 1,500-year-old Buddha statues in the eastern town of Bamiyan, because they were judged to be anti-Islamic.
Hundreds of members of the Taliban from across the country spent more than three weeks demolishing the gigantic statues carved into the side of a cliff.
In 2003 the cultural landscape and archaeological remains of the Bamiyan Valley were put on UNESCO’S world heritage list.

Mutual respect and tolerance?

1 July 2016

Attackers wielding machetes killed a Hindu priest in Bangladesh on Friday morning, the fourth Hindu to be targeted during the past month in more than three years of similar killings by Islamist militants in this Muslim-majority country.

Islamic State militants claimed responsibility for the death in a report by the group’s Amaq News Agency, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist activity online.
More than 40 people have been killed in Bangladesh in a series of attacks that began in early 2013. The attacks initially targeted bloggers but then expanded to include foreigners, gay activists and members of religious minorities. In an effort to forestall further violence, the government announced a crackdown in early June and has arrested more than 11,000 people, 194 of them said to be linked to militant networks.

Kajal Debnath, a presidium member of the Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council, said that Hindus, particularly in rural villages, are terrified and call his organization daily wondering if they will survive the latest outbreak of killings. They have been victims of oppression in Bangladesh for decades and do not know why they have suddenly become the “prime target of a series of similar killings,” he said.

The killing was similar to one last month of Anando Gopal Ganguly, 68, a Hindu priest, Mr. Kanjilal said. Mr. Ganguly was riding a bicycle in an isolated rural area not far from his home when three men on a motorcycle came up from behind to attack him.
The Islamic State also claimed responsibility for the death of Mr. Ganguly in a report by Amaq, according to the SITE Intelligence Group.

Muslims killing Muslims, or anybody they don’t like, and so much senseless violence that spares not even children:

“A Slow, Steady Siege on an ISIS Stronghold in Libya”
By DECLAN WALSH, 29 June 2016 – New York Times

Life under ISIS as seen by a teenager who fled, excerpts from the original article:

Perched on a doorstep, the teenage Juma brothers whiled away the afternoon ….
They had fled their home in Surt, the Islamic State’s Libyan stronghold, three weeks earlier as a Libyan fighting force, quietly supported by American and British Special Operations troops, swept toward the coastal city from the desert. Now, as the siege intensified, the Juma brothers were sitting out the battle at this farmhouse on the southern edge of Surt, their apprehension tempered by a wave of sheer relief.

“Life was hell,” said Hammad, a lanky 16-year-old with a shock of unkempt hair, describing the Islamic State’s brutal 18-month rule. Cafes were closed, schools renamed and girls flogged for not covering their faces, he said. He watched in horror as a hooded figure chopped off the hand of a thief — a desperate man who had stolen medicine. Nightmares came after the Islamists crucified people accused of crimes at a major traffic junction, then left their bodies to rot.
“I would wake in a panic, thinking I was suffocating,” he said. His brother Mohammed, 19, nodded in agreement. The Islamists had executed his friend Abdullah by pushing him from a tall building, accusing him of blasphemy. Abdullah was 15 years old, Mohammed said.
….

As reported by Agence France-Presse SCMP, 04 July 2016
Muslims killing Muslims, so many innocent people slaughtered, all WHY?

Angry Iraqis pelt prime minister’s convoy with rocks after IS bombing kills at least 200.
Sunday’s bombing in a popular shopping district was the deadliest terror attack in Iraq in a year.
Iraqi authorities on Monday raised the death toll to more than 200 from Sunday’s devastating truck bombing at a bustling Baghdad commercial street as Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi ordered new security measures in the country’s capital.

The blast, which the Islamic State group said it carried out, hit the Karrada district early Sunday as the area was packed with shoppers ahead of this week’s holiday marking the end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.
The attack sparked anger among Iraqis at the government’s inability to keep them safe even as its forces push IS back, and prompted Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi to announce efforts to address longstanding flaws in Baghdad security measures.

As reported by Agence France-Presse Reuters SCMP, 05 July 2016
Muslims killing Muslims, worse, in Holy Sites:

Suicide bombers hit three Saudi cities in fourth terror attack in less than a week; four dead.
Suicide bombers struck three cities across Saudi Arabia on Monday, in an apparently coordinated campaign of attacks as Saudis prepared to break their fast on the penultimate day of the holy month of Ramadan.
Four Saudi security personnel were killed and five others were wounded in a suicide bombing outside one of Islam’s holiest sites, the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, the interior ministry said.

“Security forces suspected a man who was heading towards Al-Masjid al-Nabawi (the Prophet’s Mosque) as he passed through a visitors parking lot. As they tried to stop him, he blew himself up with an explosive belt causing his death, and the death of four security personnel,” said the statement, adding that five others were injured.

The explosions targeting US diplomats, Shi’ite worshippers and a security headquarters at a mosque in the holy city of Medina follow days of mass killings claimed by the Islamic State group, in Turkey, Bangladesh and Iraq. The attacks all seem to have been timed to coincide with the approach of Eid al-Fitr, the holiday that celebrates the end of the fast. …
A Saudi security official said an attacker parked a car near the US consulate in Jeddah before detonating the device. The official said the government was checking the reports of blasts in Qatif and Medina.

Senseless atrocities:

As reported 14 June 2016, Agence France-Presse, Reuters and Associated Press

Philippine troops found the decapitated head of Canadian hostage Robert Hall in a plastic bag in Jolo town Monday night after a large ransom demand by Abu Sayyaf militants was not met
Philippine authorities have defended their inability to save a second Canadian hostage who was beheaded by Muslim extremist guerrillas, despite months of pursuit.

“We strongly condemn the brutal and senseless murder of Mr. Robert Hall, a Canadian national, after being held captive by the Abu Sayyaf group in Sulu for the past nine months,” presidential spokesman Herminio Coloma said in a statement.

Earlier, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared that his government has “every reason to believe” that Hall had been killed by the Abu Sayyaf, the second Canadian captive to be slain this year.
Members of the notorious kidnap-for-ransom Abu Sayyaf gang had said they would murder Hall if they did not receive 300 million pesos ($6.5 million) ransom by Monday afternoon.
Hall was among four people abducted in September last year from aboard yachts at a tourist resort on Samal island in the southern Philippines.
Another Canadian kidnapped at the same time, John Ridsdel, was beheaded in April after a similar ransom demand of 300 million pesos was not paid.

The fates of the two other people abducted at the Samal resort – Hall’s Filipina girlfriend Marites Flor and Norwegian resort manager Kjartan Sekkingstad – were not known.

Listed by the United States as a terrorist organisation, the Abu Sayyaf is a loose network of Islamic militants that was founded in the early 1990s with money from Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network.
Its leaders have in recent years declared allegiance to the Islamic State group that holds territory in Iraq and Syria.