Shattering Myths – March 6, 2015 Hour 1
http://www.nytimes.com/2...-stirs-outrage.html?_r=0ISIS Bulldozing of Ancient Nimrud Site in Iraq Stirs OutrageBy RICK GLADSTONE and SOMINI SENGUPTAMARCH 6, 2015
A relief of a mythological creature in the Palace of Ashurnasirpal II in Nimrud, Iraq. Militants used bulldozers and other vehicles to vandalize the site. Credit DeAgostini/Getty Images
“This is yet another attack against the Iraqi people, reminding us that nothing is safe from the cultural cleansing underway in the country,” said the official, Irina Bokova, who is director general of Unesco, the United Nations organization for education, science and culture.
Nimrud, Iraq
By The New York Times
“It targets human lives, minorities, and is marked by the systematic destruction of humanity’s ancient heritage,” Ms. Bokova said in a statement on the Unesco website.
Iraq’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities confirmed on Thursday that Islamic State militants had used bulldozers and other heavy vehicles to vandalize an important archaeological site at Nimrud, about 18 miles southeast of Mosul, the northern Iraqi city seized by the group in June.
Nimrud was founded more than 3,300 years ago as a central city of the Assyrian empire, and today is considered one of the most important archaeological sites in the world. Its remaining statues, frescos and other works are widely revered.
“Every person on the planet should pause after yesterday’s violent attack on humanity’s heritage and understand ISIS’ intent not only to control the future of humankind but also to erase and rewrite our past,” said Deborah M. Lehr, chairwoman and co-founder of the Antiquities Coalition, a Washington-based archaeological advocacy group.
“We must unite with global intention to preserve our common heritage and resist ISIS’ effort to steal not only our future freedom but also our history, the very roots of our civilization,” she said in a statement on its website.
The Nimrud destruction came a week after Islamic State militants videotaped themselves marauding through Mosul’s museum, using sledgehammers and torches to destroy statues, artifacts and books. “They’re taking us back to the dark ages, those people,” said Mohamed Alhakim, Iraq’s ambassador to the United Nations. “They are thugs.”
Ms. Bokova, who was visiting the United Nations headquarters in New York on Friday to attend a Security Council meeting over the plundering of artifacts in northern Iraq, said in an interview that “protecting cultural heritage is not a luxury, it’s an imperative.”
Asserting that she had not been taken seriously over worries about cultural looting and destruction at the start of the Syrian conflict four years ago, Ms. Bokova expressed hope that governments around the world, spurred by a Security Council resolution passed nearly four months ago, would now strengthen customs officers and courts to crack down on pilfered antiquities.
Ms. Bokova said Unesco had been working with auction houses, Interpol, and officials from several countries to track the trade in stolen objects.
Islamic State leaders have sought to justify the cultural destruction by asserting that statues and other artifacts violate Islamic prohibitions on idol worship. But religious authorities have called all such destruction barbaric and anti-Islamic.
Archaeologists and antiquities experts have also accused the Islamic State of profiting from many plundered antiquities. Some have said the looters take small objects that they can sell, and destroy those that are too heavy to be easily smuggled.
Abdulamir al-Hamdani, an Iraqi archaeologist who specializes in Mesopotamia at the Department of Anthropology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, said in a telephone interview that Mosul residents had seen Islamic State fighters removing artifacts in order to sell them. He expressed alarm that the next target could be the ruins of Hatra, about 68 miles southwest of Mosul, which is also within the area controlled by the Islamic State.
Hatra, thought to have been founded in the third or second century B.C., became an important religious center that was ruled by a succession of Arabian princes, and is one of several Unesco World Heritage sites in the region.
“I’m really worried about Hatra now,” Mr. Hamdani said. “ISIS has a plan to destroy them one by one.”
Susan Ackerman, a religion professor at Dartmouth College, where the Hood Museum of Art is home to a number of Assyrian artifacts, said she feared that Khorsabad, another ancient Assyrian city north of Mosul, also was imperiled.
Asked why Islamic State fighters would loot some artifacts and destroy others, she said, “I don’t have much of an answer except to tell you they’re hypocrites.”
“They’re willing to be self-righteous and ideological about the things that are too big to move, and ruthlessly opportunistic about the small things they can smuggle on the black market,” Ms. Ackerman said.
Ms. Bokova said her agency did not have specific information about who was trading in looted artifacts, except that previous incidents, namely in Mali, suggested that they were part of the networks that raise money for extremists by trading in oil, drugs and guns.
“They’re the same criminal groups,” she said. “They’re not, how to put it, admirers of art.”
http://www.theguardian.c...efacts-mosul-museum-iraqIsis fighters destroy ancient artefacts at Mosul museum Footage shows Islamic State militants in Iraq smashing statues with sledgehammers in bid to crush what they call non-Islamic ideas
Kareem Shaheen in Beirut
Thursday 26 February 2015 16.26 EST Last modified on Friday 27 February 2015 08.55 EST
Islamic State militants ransacked Mosul’s central museum, destroying priceless artefacts that are thousands of years old, in the group’s latest rampage which threatens to upend millennia of coexistence in the Middle East.
The destruction of statues and artefacts that date from the Assyrian and Akkadian empires, revealed in a video published by Isis on Thursday, drew ire from the international community and condemnation by activists and minorities that have been attacked by the group.
“The birthplace of human civilisation … is being destroyed”, said Kino Gabriel, one of the leaders of the Syriac Military Council – a Christian militia – in a telephone interview with the Guardian from Hassakeh in north-eastern Syria. The destruction took place in Mosul, the Iraqi city that has been under the control of Isis since June when jihadi fighters advanced rapidly across the country’s north.
“In front of something like this, we are speechless,” said Gabriel. “Murder of people and destruction is not enough, so even our civilisation and the culture of our people is being destroyed.”
Isis destroys thousands of books and manuscripts in Mosul librariesThe five-minute video, which was released by the “press office of the province of Nineveh [the region around Mosul]”, begins with a Qur’anic verse on idol worship. An Isis representative then speaks to the camera, condemning Assyrians and Akkadians as polytheists, justifying the destruction of the artefacts and statues.
The man describes the prophet Muhammad’s destruction of idols in Mecca as an example.
“These statues and idols, these artifacts, if God has ordered its removal, they became worthless to us even if they are worth billions of dollars,” the man said.
Isis militants then smash the statues in the Mosul museum with hammers and push them to the ground, watching them break into tiny fragments. The footage also shows a man dressed in black at a nearby archaeological site, inside Mosul, drilling through and destroying a winged bull, an Assyrian protective deity, that dates back to the 7th century BC
“When you watch the footage, you feel visceral pain and outrage, like you do when you see human beings hurt,” said Mardean Isaac, an Assyrian writer and member of A Demand for Action, an organisation dedicated to protecting the rights of the Assyrians and other minorities in Syria and Iraq.
A caption says the artefacts did not exist in the time of the prophet, and were put on display by “devil worshippers”, a term the militant group has used in the past to describe members of the Yazidi minority.
A professor at the Archaeology College in Mosul confirmed to the Associated Press that the two sites depicted in the video are the city museum and Nirgal Gate, one of several gates to Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian empire.
“I’m totally shocked,” Amir al-Jumaili told the AP “It’s a catastrophe. With the destruction of these artefacts, we can no longer be proud of Mosul’s civilisation.”
Isis took control of Mosul last summer in a lightning advance that led to the eviction of thousands of Christians and other minorities from their ancestral homelands in the Nineveh plains, amid reports of forced conversions.
“We cannot expect anything else from Daesh,” said Gabriel, using the Arabic acronym for Isis.
He said the international community must act to prevent the destruction and looting of the artifacts.
“The loss is the loss of the entire world,” he said.
Isaac said: “While the Islamic State is ethnically cleansing the contemporary Assyrian populations of Iraq and Syria, they are also conducting a simultaneous war on their ancient history and the right of future generations of all ethnicities and religions to the material memory of their ancestors.”
The destruction of the priceless treasures comes days after Isis kidnapped 220 Assyrian Christian villagers in north-eastern Syria.
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It is the latest assault in a campaign against coexistence in the region, especially in Iraq, which has seen the displacement of many of its Chaldean Christians, who have lived there with many ethnic minorities since the religion’s dawn.
Isis has also attempted to starve and enslave members of the Yazidi minority in Iraq.
Irina Bokova, the director general of Unesco, the UN cultural agency, said she was deeply shocked at the footage showing the destruction and has asked the president of the UN security council to convene an emergency meeting “on the protection of Iraq’s cultural heritage as an integral element for the country’s security”.
