Islamic State fighters’ nihilistic campaign against history
Propaganda videos on social media from the so-called Islamic State shows the apparent destruction of Iraq’s priceless artefacts and some of the most important surviving relics of the ancient world.
In between grisly displays of barbarity, Isis fighters recently have been filmed ransacking and looting museums as well as drilling apart the remnants of the Assyrian and Akkadian empires.
In February, fighters stormed the museum of Iraq’s second city, Mosul, knocking over the statues on display and drilling into the Winged Bull, an Assyrian protective deity with local and global significance.
A fighter said: “These statues and idols, these artefacts, if God has ordered its removal, they became worthless to us even if they are worth billions of dollars.”
Though many of the statues held in Mosul would have been replicas the Winged Bull is thought to be the original from the gates of Nineveh, dating back to the seventh century.
In March reports emerged of ISIS attempting to bulldoze their way through sites near Mosul, and Isis released a film showing the destruction of the 2000-year-old city of Hatra, a large fortified city in northern Iraq that withstood attack by the Romans.
A Unesco world heritage site, Hatra dates back at least 2,000 years to the Selecuid Empire and was home to numerous temples and sculptures dedicated to the ancient gods.
.jpg)
Iraqi officials said the extent of the damage to the city is unclear, but there were reports it had been completely demolished by explosions and bulldozers. Unesco head Irina Bokova described the destruction as “cultural cleansing” and a “war crime”.
In both the Mosul and Hatra videos, the fighters threatened their next target would be Nimrud – one of the most important cities in the Assyrian Empire. Over the weekend, video footage showed the Unesco world heritage site being bulldozed, hammered and blown into bits.
A black-clad fighter tells the camera: “God has honoured us in the Islamic State to remove all of these idols and statutes worshipped instead of Allah in the past days.”
The scale of the devastation at Nimrud appears to be the greatest yet; the whole city full of Iraq’s greatest archaeological treasures is seen razed to the ground and reduced to rubble.
The historic vandalism recalls some of the worst excesses of other jihadist groups; the 2001 destruction by the Taliban of the ancient Buddhas of Bamiyan and the destruction of the shrines of Muslim in the ancient Malian City of Timbuktu in 2012. The fear now is that Libya’s Greco-Roman treasures could be next.