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The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Islamic State (IS), and by its Arabic language acronym Daesh, is a Salafi jihadist militant group that follows a fundamentalist, Wahhabi doctrine of Sunni Islam.<br/><br/> The group has been designated a terrorist organisation by the United Nations and many individual countries. ISIL is widely known for its videos of beheadings of both soldiers and civilians, including journalists and aid workers, and its destruction of cultural heritage sites. The United Nations holds ISIL responsible for human rights abuses and war crimes, and Amnesty International has charged the group with ethnic cleansing on a historic scale in northern Iraq.
Palmyra was an ancient city in Syria. It was an important city in central Syria, located in an oasis 215 km northeast of Damascus and 180 km southwest of the Euphrates at Deir ez-Zor. It had long been a vital caravan city for travellers crossing the Syrian desert and was known as the Bride of the Desert.<br/><br/> The earliest documented reference to the city by its Semitic name Tadmor, Tadmur or Tudmur (which means 'the town that repels' in Amorite and 'the indomitable town' in Aramaic) is recorded in Babylonian tablets found in Mari.<br/><br/> The 3m high, 15 tonne limestone statue named 'The Lion of Al-Lat' was discovered in 1977 by a Polish archaeological mission at the temple of al-Lat, a pre-Islamic Arabian goddess, and dated back to the 1st century BCE.