Militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, known as Isis, have begun bulldozing one of Iraq’s most significant archeological sites, in its latest attempt to wipe out symbols it considers idolatrous.
The extremist group reportedly began levelling the site of the lost Assyrian city of Nimrud on Thursday. Built along the bluffs of the Tigris about 3,300 years ago the site is filled with precious artefacts and the remains of a palace.
“The Isis terrorist gangs continue to defy international will and human sensibilities after committing a new offence in a series of reckless crimes,” said a statement posted on the Iraqi tourism ministry website. “It assaulted the archaeologically significant city of Nimrud with heavy vehicles. Leaving these gangs unpunished lets them destroy humanity, hurting all the civilisations of Mesopotamia and causing irreparable damage.”
Isis seized control of much of western and religiously diverse northwestern Iraq in a lightning offensive nine months ago. Though the Iraqi army, backed by US-led air strikes and Shia militias, has managed to largely contain the jihadis and even roll back some of their gains, the group has begun to impose its stark vision on areas it controls.
Last month Isis released videos showing its supporters savagely smashing artefacts or their replicas at an ancient history museum in Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, which has been under the group’s control since June.
The Iraqi Kurdistan news outlet Rudaw reported on Friday that Isis had blown up the city’s 19th century Ottoman-era Hamo mosque, which includes tombs of late clerics that drew worshippers.
Isis’s puritanical strain of Islam considers worship of any figure other than God akin to paganism.
Iraqi media cited witnesses confirming that Isis militants had begun to demolish Nimrud, which lies 35km south of Mosul. The Iraqi tourism ministry has called for an urgent UN Security Council meeting regarding the Nimrud destruction, which Unesco, the UN’s education and cultural heritage arm, denounced as a war crime.
“The deliberate destruction of cultural heritage constitutes a war crime,” Irina Bokova, head of Unesco, said in a statement. “I call on all political and religious leaders in the region to stand up and remind everyone that there is absolutely no political or religious justification for the destruction of humanity’s cultural heritage.”
Nimrud, also known as Kalhi, is among Iraq’s most archaeologically significant sites, filled with ornate statues and reliefs depicting lions and winged bulls. Over the decades, many of the artefacts from the site have been removed for display at museums in the west. But a lot remain in situ.
“It’s a place where they left the original pieces on site,” said Peter Pfalzner, a noted German archeologist who has just returned from a research mission in northern Iraq.
Mr Pfalzner described Nimrud as a massive city, and estimated that perhaps 90 per cent of its ruins remain underground, hopefully shielded from Isis’s wrath. But he added that the artefacts that have been excavated and are vulnerable to Isis are extremely significant.
“It is a wonderful place to study both architecture and art history,” the University of Tübingen scholar said during a visit to Cairo. “If this has been lost it would be disastrous.”
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