Leptis Magna was deserted when I last visited — no wonder. Tourists daren’t visit Libya these days and so I had the ruins to myself. I climbed the steps of the vast Roman theatre, looked out to where the Wadi Lebda meets the sea, then stopped. Men with AK-47s. My immediate fear was that they were Islamic State. Isis move closer to Leptis Magna every day and it would make sense for this most spectacular site to be next on their hit list.
Their last great coup was on the other side of the Med, when they blew up the Temple of Baal Shamin in Palmyra, known as ‘the Pearl of the Desert’. It’s part of their cultural jihad, but they also do it for the global outrage that follows. No such thing as bad press for Isis.
As the gunmen approached, they looked less threatening and began to speak. They were, they explained, not Isis but a group of local volunteers protecting the site from the Islamist terrorists: Neighbourhood Watch, with Kalashnikovs.
That you need guns to protect ancient sites from Isis is a given. Look what they did to Khaled al-Asaad in Palmyra. The 82-year-old archaeologist, director of antiquities, refused to disclose the whereabouts of artefacts which had been moved for safekeeping. He was tortured and beheaded, and his headless corpse strung up with a placard saying ‘Director of Idolatry’.
Dr Asaad had been urged by family members, colleagues and friends to leave Palmyra after Isis took over. But he had been working at the sites for 45 years, discovering some of its most famous treasures including a trove from the Sassanid dynasty, which ruled from c. 200 to 600 ad, and he felt he had a duty to protect them.
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