The Syrian headquarters of alleged hashish-smoking assassins.

A 1,500-year-old ghost settlement is slowly fading away.

Ruins of the Crusaders' headquarters.

Mysterious lost empire of the Silk Road.

The oldest Christian monastery in Iraq until ISIS blew it up twice and then drove over it with bulldozers.

This former monument to an invented Iraqi victory was turned into a military camp during the subsequent invasion.

A giant bisected onion dome remembers the Iraqis who died in the Iran-Iraq War.

A bloody history is captured in this former prison turned museum.

An ancient sanctuary that has long been a holy site for the Chaldean Christian Church.

This ancient stone bridge is a hub for daredevils.

A boiling wellspring flowing with natural gas burns in a continual blaze.

The surviving pieces of an ancient aqueduct that may have fed into the lost Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

A 2200 year old vessel may have been able to keep a charge.

Ancient rock-cut tomb? Definitely. That of a great Median king? Unlikely.

Giant reed houses made in the marshes of Southern Iraq.

A 605-page Quran penned in the blood of a dictator is locked away in a mosque.

A shrine on the shores of the Tigris.

This beautiful arched gate is all that remains of the fortress the ancient mountaintop town of Amadiya once was.

An ancient fortified mound raised over the millennia from settlements built one on top of the other.

9th century Abbasid mosque, damaged in modern warfare.

The sacred shrine of the Yazidis.

Celebrated as a center of civilization, the remains of the ancient city have been nearly destroyed by greed, egoism, and war.

A shipwreck named Desire at the shore of Batumi.

A beautiful but deteriorating monument of Soviet architecture.