CNN news 2015-08-24 加文本

cnn news 2015-08-24

We're starting in Syria. The situation in this Middle Eastern country is the world's largest humanitarian crisis. That's according to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in Syria's on-going civil wars, started in 2011. More than 11 million have fled their homes. And the ISIS terrorist group, which wants to create its own country, has taken over large parts of Syria.

Amid everything that's going on, ISIS is destroying historic artifacts. The Muslim militants have taken aim at many relics that aren't associated with Muslim culture. They recently murdered a Syrian professor who refused to pledge to ISIS and to tell them where certain archeological treasures are in the Syrian city of Palmyra.

He wasn't the only Syrian peacefully defending his county's artifacts.

This is the centerpiece in the heart of the Syrian Antiquities Ministry's efforts to save this country's cultural heritage, of course, in this time of the civil war. What you can see here is these volunteers here are cataloguing small pieces we can look at them, of artifacts that have been found in various places here in the country. Of course, some of them in places that are now controlled by ISIS.

Now, all of them are going to get a number, and then afterwards, what's going to happen is they're going to go to the station over here where you can see that all these pieces are photographed.

And the folks here have already done an amazing amount of work. They've catalogued more than 150,000 pieces already, 35,000 of those from the Palmyra area alone.

So, they've been working a lot and under very difficult conditions, because this building here has taken mortar rounds in the past. There have been scientists from this building that have been killed and yet the folks come here almost everyday to continue this work.