Mapping the Terrorist Threat to Middle Eastern Architecture

Last week, ISIS razed the oldest Christian monastery in Iraq. The St. Elijah monastery was 1,400 years old and stood in the South of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city and a current ISIS stronghold. Unfortunately, it was just the latest casualty in the ISIS-led campaign to wipe out culturally and historically significant architecture in regions under their control; via The Associated Press:

The Washington, D.C.-based Antiquities Coalition, a group fighting to protect cultural artifacts and monuments around the wold, has been tracking such instances of “cultural cleansing” by terrorist organizations operating in the Middle East and North Africa. Using this data, they’ve now created the Culture Under Threat Map, which shows which heritage sites are under threat, and which ones have already been destroyed and damaged.