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ISLAMIC STATE AND MESOPOTAMIAN SITES IN SYRIA AND IRAQ
Islamic State of Iraq flag
In the early and mid 2010s, Islamist militants from so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) viciously attacked Mesopotamia-era archaeological sites and museums in Syria and Iraq with sledgehammers, bulldozers and explosives. The militant group released videos of the destruction of the Temple of Baalshamin, one of the best-preserved ruins at the Syrian site of Palmyra, the demolition of monuments in the Assyrian capital of Nineveh and the smashing of Assyrian statues and artifacts at the museum in Mosul.
Andrew Curry of National Geographic wrote The destruction is part of a propaganda campaign that includes videos of militants rampaging through Iraq's Mosul Museum with pickaxes and sledgehammers, and the dynamiting of centuries-old Christian and Muslim shrines’. [Source: Andrew Curry, National Geographic, September 1, 2015]
For a few years ISIS controlled “large stretches of Syria, along with northern and western Iraq. There' was little to stop its militants from plundering and destroying sites under their control. The militant group was one of many factions fighting for control of Syria, where a civil war has left more than 230,000 dead and millions more homeless.”
“The group claims the destruction of ancient sites is religiously motivated; Its militants have targeted well-known ancient sites along with more modern graves and shrines belonging to other Muslim sects, citing idol worship to justify their actions. At the same time, ISIS has used looting as a moneymaking venture to finance military operations. “It’s both propagandistic and sincere,” says Columbia University historian Christopher Jones, who has chronicled the damage on his blog. “They see themselves as recapitulating the early history of Islam.”
Mesopotamian Sites and Artifacts Destroyed or Damaged by Islamic State
Mesopotamian-era sites and artifacts destroyed or damaged by Islamic State included Mari in Syria and Ninevah, the Mosul Museum and Nimrud in Iraq. Andrew Curry of National Geographic wrote: “Mari flourished in the Bronze Age, between 3000 and 1600 B.C. Archaeologists have discovered palaces, temples, and extensive archives written on clay tablets that shed light on the early days of civilization in the region. According to reports from locals and satellite imagery, the site, especially the royal palace, is being looted systematically. [Source: Andrew Curry, National Geographic, September 1, 2015]
“Nineveh: Iraq: Ancient Assyria was one of the first true empires, expanding aggressively across the Middle East and controlling a vast stretch of the ancient world between 900 and 600 B.C. The Assyrian kings ruled their realm from a series of capitals in what is today northern Iraq. Nineveh was one of them, flourishing under the Assyrian emperor Sennacherib around 700 B.C. At one point, Nineveh was the largest city in the world. Its location on the outskirts of Mosul—part of the modern city is built over Nineveh's ruins—put it in ISIS's crosshairs when the group took over the city in 2014. Many of the site's sculptures were housed in the Mosul Museum (see entry below), and some were damaged during the rampage through the museum documented on video. Men were also shown smashing half-human, half-animal guardian statues called lamassus on Nineveh's ancient Nirgal Gate. “I’m not sure there’s much left to destroy in Mosul,” says Columbia’s Jones.
“Mosul Museum and Libraries: Reports of looting at Mosul's libraries and universities began to surface almost as soon as ISIS occupied the city in summer of 2014. Centuries-old manuscripts were stolen, and thousands of books disappeared into the shadowy international art market. Mosul University's library was burned in December. In late February, the ISIS campaign escalated: Mosul's central public library, a landmark built in 1921, was rigged with explosives and razed, together with thousands of manuscripts and instruments used by Arab scientists.
Nimrud, an Islamic State target
The book burning coincided with the release of the video showing ISIS fighters rampaging through the Mosul Museum, toppling statues and smashing others with hammers. The museum was Iraq's second largest, after the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. Statues included masterpieces from Hatra and Nineveh. Margarete van Ess, head of the German Archaeological Institute's Iraq field office, says that a trained eye can tell that about half of the artifacts destroyed in the video are copies; many of the originals are in the Iraq Museum.
Nimrud: Nimrud was the first Assyrian capital, founded 3,200 years ago. Its rich decoration reflected the empire's power and wealth. The site was excavated beginning in the 1840s by British archaeologists, who sent dozens of its massive stone sculptures to museums around the world, including New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and the British Museum in London. Many originals remained in Iraq.
“Nineveh: The walls of Nineveh were built around A.D. 700 to protected the Assyrian capital, at the time probably the largest city in the world. In February, ISIS fighters released video of fighters smashing sculptures and gates at the ancient site. The site itself is massive: An earthen wall surrounds 890 acres. The Iraqi Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities says ISIS bulldozed parts of the site, but the extent of the damage isn't yet clear. Some of the city was never uncovered and remains underground—protected, one hopes.”
Khorsabad is another ancient Assyrian capital, a few miles from Mosul. The palace there was built between 717 and 706 B.C. by Assyria's King Sargon II. Its reliefs and statues were remarkably well preserved, with traces of the original paint still decorating depictions of Assyrian victories and royal processions. Most of the reliefs and many of the statues were removed during French excavations in the mid-1800s and by teams from Chicago's Oriental Institute in the 1920s and '30s, and are now in the Iraq Museum in Baghdad as well as in Chicago and the Louvre in Paris. It's not clear what part of the site ISIS targeted. "We don't have photography showing how far the damage might go," van Ess says. "The only information right now is from local people and Iraqi antiquities ministry."
Islamic State Bulldozes and Loots Nimrud
In March 2015, several months after it captured nearby Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, Islamic State jihadists bulldozed and looted the world-famous Nimrud archaeological site in northern Iraq in an act described by UNESCO as a “war crime” Islamic State later released a video that showed militants smashing panels with sledgehammers, scooping up stones with bulldozers and rigging the site with explosive barrels that were detonated, with the explosions filmed from different angles.
Daniela Deane and Brian Murphy wrote in the Washington Post: “The destruction at the more than 3,000-year-old landmark — considered one of the most important archaeological sites uncovered in the past century — marked another blow against the area’s renowned pre-Islamic cultural heritage.A statement from Iraq’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said the Islamic State continues to “defy the will of the world and the feelings of humanity” with this latest attack, in which the extremists used heavy military vehicles to crush treasured relics from one of ancient Mesopotamia’s greatest cities. [Source: Daniela Deane and Brian Murphy, Washington Post, March 6 2015]
Islamic State fighters
“The Islamic State claims that the area’s pre-Islamic heritage of ancient shrines and statues represents past idol worship that it views as heretical. A tribal source from nearby Mosul confirmed to the Reuters news agency that the Islamic State had pillaged the site, on the banks of the Tigris River. “Islamic State members came to the Nimrud archaeological city and looted the valuables in it, and then they proceeded to level the site to the ground,” the source told Reuters. “There used to be statues and walls as well as a castle that Islamic State has destroyed completely,” the source said. In a message posted on Twitter, the former prime minister of Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdish region, Barham Salih, called the Nimrud destruction “slaughtering the present and erasing humanity’s heritage.” “Daesh terrorist gangs continue to defy the will of the world and the feelings of humanity,” Iraq’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said, referring to the Islamic State by the name widely used in Arabic. “In a new crime in their series of reckless offenses, they assaulted the ancient city of Nimrud and bulldozed it with heavy machinery, appropriating the archaeological attractions dating back 13 centuries B.C.,” it said.
In Paris, UNESCO Director General Irina Bokova said the ravage of Nimrud amounts to a “war crime,” and she notified the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. Nimrud is considered a world heritage site by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).Many of Nimrud’s most famous surviving monuments were removed years ago by archaeologists, including colossal Winged Bulls, now housed in London’s British Museum. Hundreds of precious stones and pieces of gold were moved to Baghdad.
On the devastation found two years later, Kareem Fahim and Mustafa Salim wrote in Washington Post: “ The palace of Ashurnasirpal II, an Assyrian king, had survived for three millennia before the Islamic State militants arrived and sacked the place with glee.They smashed the statutes of winged creatures that had stood sentry at a gate, leaving them in a terrible, broken heap — a wing here, a foot there. They pulled down stone relief panels that once lined the palace walls, ripping them so crudely in places that the panels splintered, leaving a tantalizing but painful reminder of what was. And the militants bulldozed Nimrud’s ziggurat, the mud-brick base of a once-soaring ancient temple, reducing it to a nondescript pile of dirt. [Source: Kareem Fahim and Mustafa Salim, Washington Post, November 16, 2016]
Islamic States Attack Nineveh
The same Islamic State that showed the destruction at the Mosul Museum showed militants with a jackhammer destroying a famous 3000-year-old monumental statue of a winged bull with a man’s head that stood guard at the Nergal Gate, the entrance to Nineveh, near Mosul. Amy Davidson wrote in The New Yorker: “An ISIS man in the video talks about how Muhammad destroyed idols of people he fought when he took Mecca. The camera zeroes in on a label near a portal leading to the Nergal gate, and a green light highlights a line explaining that Nergal was “the God of the Plague and the nether world and he is among the Sumerian Gods who was worshipped in Mesopotamia for a long time”—as if that were a telling indictment. ISIS is both indifferent to the value of the past and rhetorically obsessed with it. It has looted and sold plenty of “idols” to pay for its guns; these ones were probably just too big to carry.[Source: Amy Davidson, The New Yorker , February 27, 2015]
“At one point, the wall that surrounded Nineveh was more than seven miles in circumference, with fifteen gates. In the video, an ISIS spokesman talks about how many of the statues had still been buried in Muhammad’s time—Nineveh had been largely destroyed a thousand years earlier, in a battle that marked the rise of the Babylonians—but had since been excavated by “devil worshippers.” That is what the group calls Yazidis, members of an Iraqi religious minority whom it has treated murderously, though it may have been a more general accusation.”
Islamic State’s Destruction of Nimrud Worse Than Originally Thought
In November 2016, Nimrud was retaken by Iraqi forces from Islamic State during an Iraqi offensive to reclaim Mosul and some of the first on the scene were surprised the amount of destruction they saw. Richard Spencer wrote in The Times: “The statues lie shattered in the sand. Where the great palace of Ashurnasirpal II once looked out over the desert, now stand tumbling walls filled with holes. The world last saw the palace as the fighters of Islamic State, proudly recording the moment on video for the world to see, placed dynamite all around it and pressed the detonator. It disappeared in a plume of dust. [Source: Richard Spencer, The Times, November 16, 2016 +]
“At the foot of what now look like any other ruins of the Iraqi war zone lie fragments of the magnificent friezes that once gave such a vivid impression of imperial Assyrian life 2,900 years ago, with its hunting, chariots and processions — a lion’s leg, a human foot shorn from the body above, the tip of a bearded angel’s wing. The giant ziggurat, the pyramid that served as a temple to Ninurta, the God of War, has been levelled by forces who worship at his altar while determined to desecrate any memorial to a deity other than their own. +\
“Archaeologists had a good idea what to expect. There was no reason to suppose that the footage released by Isis in April last year was anything other than genuine. Its jihadists took their electric drills and sledgehammers to the giant winged bulls with human heads which guarded the gateways both to Nimrud and Nineveh. Satellite imagery showed more evidence of the damage, including the destruction of the 140ft ziggurat, which was bulldozed in September and October as Iraqi forces advanced...News agency photographers allowed into the site by Iraqi officers, who are still checking it for mines and booby traps. “One hundred per cent has been destroyed,” Ali al-Bayati, a resident of a nearby village told Reuters as he surveyed the scene from a hill overlooking the site. “Losing Nimrud is more
Susannah George and Qassim Abdul-zahra of Associated Press wrote: “Nearly a month into the fight to retake Mosul, government forces pushed Islamic State militants out of nearby Nimrud... And when soldiers finally surveyed the extremists' destruction of the ancient sites, one said that those who carried it out "don't have a place in humanity." Intricate reliefs that once stood at the gates to the magnificent Assyrian palace lay in pieces: stone carvings of a face, half of a claw, part of a wing, fragments of script. [Source: Susannah George and Qassim Abdul-zahra, Associated Press, November 16, 2016 ^^]
“Iraqi officers accompanied journalists to the site, wandering through the piles of rubble and snapping photos of the damage that U.N. officials had once called "a war crime." The Assyrian Ziggurat, nearly 3,000 years old and once one of the tallest surviving buildings of the ancient world, has been leveled. On palace walls, only small fragments of stone carvings remained. Two Assyrian winged-bull statues that once marked the palace entrance have been completely destroyed. In a palace doorway, four deep cracks defaced a large carving of an Assyrian guardian spirit. "I didn't cry when Daesh destroyed my home, but I really cried when I saw the video of them destroying this site," said Sheikh Khaled al-Jabouri, a tribal fighter from the Nimrud area. "These ruins are not just important to the people of this area, but to all of Iraq." "This was done by people who don't have a place in humanity," said Maj. Gen. Dhiaa al-Saadi, the deputy commander of Iraqi ground forces, as he surveyed the ruins. ^^
“Archaeologists and government officials have yet to visit the site to conduct a proper assessment, according to Iraqi officers at the scene. Al-Jabouri, the local tribal fighter, said he doesn't believe any amount of restoration can repair what's been lost. "But we've heard that only 30 percent of this site has been (properly excavated)," he said, "so maybe there is more still beneath the ground." ^^
“I almost spent my whole life in the ancient sites of Mosul. These gangs didn’t only destroy my city, they have destroyed the dearest things to my heart,” Amer Al-Jumaily, a professor who taught archaeology at Mosul University, told the Washington Post. “Seeing the photos of Nimrud’s destruction, for me, was like seeing one of my sons dead,” he said.
Islamic States Attack on the Mosul Museum
ISIS captured Mosul in 2014 and released a video the following year showing fighters smashing artifacts in the museum with sledgehammers and power tools. The voice narrating the ISIS video justified the acts with verses from the Quran referencing the Prophet Muhammad’s destruction of idols in the Kaaba. “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 narration said. The museum was Iraq's second largest, after the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. Statues included masterpieces from Hatra and Nineveh. Archaeologists said that about half of the artifacts destroyed in the video were copies, with many of the originals in the Iraq Museum.
Amy Davidson wrote in The New Yorker: “One of the peculiarities of a video showing the sacking of the Mosul Museum, released on Thursday, is that some of the newest things in the collection turned quickly to dust, while some of the oldest held out longer. In the video, a gang of men from the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham push what looks like an ancient relief off a wall, and it bursts like a broken bag of flour—a plaster reproduction. In contrast, statues that were more than two thousand years old stubbornly resist, at least for a while. Some, when they are toppled, stay mostly intact, or break into a couple of pieces that one hopes could be put back together. But the ISIS men brought sledgehammers, and pound and pound until the statues are fragments. At times, they seem to be aiming for the stone faces. The scene in the video shifts outside, to a monumental statue of a winged bull with a man’s head. It stood guard at the Nergal Gate, an entry into the ancient city of Nineveh, and is almost three thousand years old. The men climb on, and go to work on it with a jackhammer. [Source: Amy Davidson, The New Yorker , February 27, 2015]
The dramatic puffs of plaster raised hopes that many, or perhaps most, of the vandalized artifacts were reproductions. That wasn’t so. “Three [of] us have watched & rewatched: more originals than I first thought,” Eleanor Robson, a professor at University College London, tweeted. On the BBC, she explained that some of the stone figures inside the museum were from the desert city of Hatra, a UNESCO World Heritage site, and had been “damaged in antiquity and carefully put back together.” Iraqi antiquities were looted and, in many cases, destroyed or lost to smugglers in the days after the American invasion, in 2003. ...Some precautions were put in place afterward; but they do not seem to have entirely reached this museum in Mosul. The video, Robson said, represented an act of cultural terrorism, meant to make anyone in the world feel powerless. “More importantly, it is targeting the people of Mosul itself,” she said. “They feel very passionately, many of them, about their ancient history.”
On what the Mosul Museum was like after Mosul was recaptured in March 2017, Associated Press reported: The antiquities museum in the Iraqi city of Mosul is in ruins. Piles of rubble fill exhibition halls and a massive fire in the building’s basement has reduced hundreds of rare books and manuscripts to ankle-deep drifts of ash. After examining AP photographs of the destruction, two Iraqi archeologists confirmed that many of the artifacts destroyed by ISIS were the original ancient stone statues dating back thousands of years, rather than replicas as some Iraqi officials and experts previously claimed. [Source: Associated Press, March 8, 2017]
“Inside the Mosul museum’s main exhibition hall, the floor was littered with the jagged remains of an ancient Assyrian bull statue and fragments from cuneiform tablets.“These are the remains of a lamassu and the lions of Nimrud,” Layla Salih, an Iraqi archaeologist and former curator of the Mosul museum said as she examined AP photographs of the remains. Salih said when ISIS took over Mosul, the museum housed two massive lamassu statues - winged lions recovered from the ancient Assryrian city of Nimrud. “They were priceless,” she said, “they were in perfect condition.” Hiba Hazim Hamad, a former archaeology professor in Mosul, confirmed Salih’s assessment, saying she believed the building held hundreds of ancient artifacts at the time ISIS overran the city, “thousands if you count the small pieces,” she added.
“Adjoining rooms on the two main floors were largely empty save for a set of carved wooden coffins and doors left untouched. There were also smaller piles of rubble from what appeared to be additional destroyed artifacts, but the stones were crushed beyond recognition.Hamad said these could be the remains of destroyed replicas, but even if replicas were on display, the original pieces would have still been inside the museum in the basement safe when ISIS overran the building. “It’s standard procedure for all museums (in Iraq),” she said referring to the practice of keeping the most valuable pieces locked away from view.
Destruction of Mari by Islamic State
Mari was one of the first archaeological sites to be occupied by Islamic State and suffered from destruction and looting while under its control. The ancient city of Mari, located in northern Syria on the middle Euphrates, south of its junction with the Habor (Khabur), was founded around 2900 B.C. and was thriving metropolis from around 2800 B.C. to its demise in 1760 B.C.. According to UNESCO: “Mari is an archaeological site of major significance. It was the royal city-state of the 3rd millennium B.C. Its discovery in 1933, followed by the discovery of Ebla in 1963, improved our understanding of Syria in the Bronze Age. Previously, we only had little information collected from Kings of Summer and Akkad inscriptions found in the current territory of Iraq.” The site has been on UNESCO’s tentative list since 1999. [Source: UNESCO]
Mary Shepperson wrote in The Guardian: “When Islamic State emerged, the part of Deir ez-Zor province in which Mari lies was one of the first areas to fall under its control in early 2014. Under IS, the site suffered an immediate explosion of looting; satellite images revealed the change from archaeological site to lunar landscape in a matter of months. More than 1,500 new looting pits were recorded at Mari between 2013 and 2015, likely representing the removal of a huge quantity of ancient objects, sold into the illegal antiquities market to fund Isis and its war. [Source: Mary Shepperson, The Guardian, April 19, 2018]
“Sadly, this is a story common to many archaeological sites across the region, but Mari isn’t just another site. For archaeologists it’s one of the most important sites so far excavated for those interested in understanding the great urban centres of Bronze Age Mesopotamia, or in diving into the turbulent politics of the second millennium BC.
“This palace area is now very badly damaged. Its protective roof was compromised by a sand storm in 2011, and the security situation at that time left it impossible to make repairs, but the recently released photos show that large parts of the palace’s 2m thick walls have now collapsed. Prof Pascal Butterlin, who directed excavations at the site up until 2010, believes such a level of destruction suggests that explosives, either ground based or more likely from air strikes, were probably involved, adding to the damage caused by looting for financial gain. Butterlin gave a paper detailing the plight of Mari at the International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East conference in Munich two weeks ago, to general dismay. Sadly, the palace chapel and all the royal reception rooms are now a mass of huge looters pits.
“Given the wonders of the palace of Mari and the importance of this site, it’s disappointing that the destruction of the palace and the plundering of the site in search of tablets and other saleable objects hasn’t received more attention. The first explanation is that cultural destruction in the Middle East has been so widespread in recent years that it’s ceased to be news-worthy in all but the most extreme cases, which is a depressing thought. A second disadvantage Mari has over more high-profile sites, such as Palmyra, is that its buildings were made of mud, and not the classical stonework which produces photogenic ruins and screams its artistic worth to a general audience. Nevertheless, Mari deserves to be considered as a loss on the same scale as any of the more celebrated sites to have suffered during the Isis conflict. “
Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons
Text Sources: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Mesopotamia sourcebooks.fordham.edu , National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, especially Merle Severy, National Geographic, May 1991 and Marion Steinmann, Smithsonian, December 1988, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Discover magazine, Times of London, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, BBC, Encyclopædia Britannica, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Time, Newsweek, Wikipedia, Reuters, Associated Press, The Guardian, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, “World Religions” edited by Geoffrey Parrinder (Facts on File Publications, New York); “History of Warfare” by John Keegan (Vintage Books); “History of Art” by H.W. Janson Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.), Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.
Last updated June 2024