The last time I felt anything like this was when the first anti-aircraft gun was trained at a Bamiyan Buddha, followed by a diligent regime of destruction in March 2001. No human life was harmed in the process, and it was clear in the aftermaths of 9/11 that if a world republic of letters was shocked and outraged by the cultural catastrophe at Bamiyan earlier that year the world republic could repair to the library and classroom it came from and lick its psychic wound. The 6th-century Buddhas, besides being magnificent and irreplaceable specimens of art, had long been real and symbolic figures of survival and natural selection in a troubled geopolitical region. They were also towering embodiments of the busy cultural traffic - and friendship - between the subcontinent and Central Asia, between the ancient Indian, Hellenistic, Roman, and Sasanian empires. The Bamiyan valley, a historical repository and sacred destination for pilgrims over many centuries, by its continued existence till 2001, had testified to a utopian coexistence of world religions, or, in this case, the existence of a religious group with the hyperbolic past of another.

It is absurd to compare the siege of a luxury hotel to the destruction of a World Heritage site, also on the grounds that hotels, unlike relics, tend to heave with perishable life, but my point is that we ought to mourn places passionately, for places can and do outlive people, and the accretion of history and stories in time-honoured monuments often makes chronic human life seem innocent of meaning in comparison.
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