The destruction of Nimrud after world ignored for years

[Anthea]

Iraqi troops recapture Nimrud, site of ancient Assyrian city, from ISIS

Iraq says city close to archaeological site bulldozed by Islamic State militants two years ago has been liberated

The Iraqi military says its forces have retaken Nimrud, the site of an ancient Assyrian city overrun by Islamic State militants two years ago.

The commander of the Mosul operation, Lt Gen Abdul-Amir Raheed Yar Allah, said troops retook the town after heavy fighting and released a statement saying that “the 9th division of the Iraqi army has liberated the town of Nimrud completely and raised the Iraqi flag over its buildings after the enemy suffered heavy casualties”.

Nimrud lies less than a mile west of the ruins of the 3,000-year-old city. It was not immediately clear if Iraqi forces had retaken the archaeological site.

The soldiers also captured the village of Numaniya, on the edge of the city that was once the capital of an Assyrian empire stretching from Egypt to parts of modern-day Iran and Turkey.

Nimrud was bulldozed last year as part of Islamic State’s campaign to destroy symbols the Sunni Muslim zealots consider idolatrous, says the Iraqi government. Activists, officials and historians condemned Isis at the time for the destruction of the ancient Assyrian archaeological site, while Unesco described the act as a war crime.

Video footage released by Isis, purportedly from Nimrud, also showed its fighters destroying relics with electric drills and explosives.

Nimrud lies on the eastern bank of the Tigris river, about 20 miles south of Mosul, where Iraqi soldiers and special forces are battling Islamic State for control of the largest city under the jihadis’ control in Iraq and neighbouring Syria.

Nimrud was first excavated in the 1840s by the British explorer Austen Henry Layard, who unearthed the winged bull gatekeeper statues later sent to the British Museum. The site also contains the palace of Ashurnasirpal, the king of Assyria.

Many of the site’s relics are in the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and other reliefs, wall paintings, clay tablets and ivory furniture recovered in the 1950s and 60s are in Iraq’s national museum in Baghdad.

Speaking to the Guardian last year following the destruction of the ancient site, historian Tom Holland said the act was “a crime against Assyria, against Iraq, and against humanity. Destroy the past, and you control the future. The Nazis knew this, and the Khmer Rouge – and the Islamic State clearly understand it too.”

David Vergili, a member of the European Syriac Union, said Isis had done “tremendous damage to the social fabric of the Middle East”.

He added: “Preserving cultural and historical heritage in Iraq and elsewhere should be a concern for the whole civilised world as the birthplace and epicentre of our civilisation.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/ ... -city-isis

Whoop-de-do

2 years to save what is left of the irreplaceable relics

Now how about

SAVING THE CAPTURED YAZIDIS

Personally speaking - I believe rescuing the Yazidis should be the first priority

The world should not involved itself with the Sunni/Shia conflict

They should only help to protect the Kurds from ISIS attacks

Leave Mosul alone - stop arming the rebels in both Syria and Iraq

They should rescue the innocent Yazidis instead of leaving them to suffer for more than

2 YEARS

[Anthea]

ISIS destruction of ancient Iraqi city revealed for first time with new photos

Extensive damage done to ‘idolatrous’ Biblical-era treasures in city of Nimrud becomes apparent as Iraqi army drives militants back to stronghold

The true scale of damage inflicted on the ancient city of Nimrud by Isis has become clear, two days after the Iraqi army managed to secure the site.

Nimrud – an ancient Assyrian city dating back 3,300 years – is one of the most precious ancient Mesopotamian ruins in existence.

Sadly, pictures and video taken there on Tuesday show the overwhelming extent of the destruction.

Engraved friezes and statues of winged bulls and lions have been reduced to rubble, and the complex’s most striking feature – a stepped pyramid known as a ziggurat – has been bulldozed to a fraction of its former height.

“When you came here before, you could imagine the life as it used to be. Now there is nothing,” tribal militia commander Ali al-Bayati, visiting the site for the first time in two years told AFP.

“One hundred per cent has been destroyed,” he added. “Losing Nimrud is more painful to me than even losing my own house.”

ISIS propaganda videos of militants smashing precious frescos and tombs of Assyrian kings with sledgehammers as well as dynamiting temples and other buildings in Nimrud in 2015 were condemned as an attack on “the world’s shared heritage” by Unesco, the UN’s cultural body.

In ISIS’ twisted interpretation of Sunni Islam, all non-Muslim culture is heretical and should be destroyed.

The jihadis captured the area in the summer of 2014 – at the same time they took over Mosul, 20 miles to the north – when ISIS managed to capture one third of Iraq and declared their caliphate.

Most of the militants were pushed out of the area over the weekend, Iraqi army officials said, but troops and local residents alike are wary of sniper fire and the possibility the ruins are rigged with improvised explosive devices, as was the case when Isis retreated from the Syrian city of Palmyra.

Unusually, Isis has not claimed the recent extra damage to Nimrud, but Michael Danti, the director of American Schools of Oriental Research Cultural Heritage Initiatives, said much of the militants’ activity since the US-backed Iraqi coalition effort to retake Mosul began last month has been erratic.

The Iraqi army is now painstakingly trying to secure the area. “We want to make sure we don’t inflict even the least damage to buildings in Nimrud already damaged by the evil [ISIS],” a colonel in the 9th Armoured Division told Reuters.

ISIS is still in control of the ancient city of Nineveh, in the centre of Mosul, and Khorsabad, another Assyrian site to the northeast, is close to the front line of the current conflict as US-backed troops attempt to push the miltants out of Iraq completely.

“Liberation of ancient Iraqi archaeological sites from the control of the forces of dark and evil is a victory not only for Iraqis but for all humanity,” Iraq’s deputy culture minister Qais Hussein Rashid said on Monday after the army announced it had retaken Nimrud.

Locals whose families had protected and preserved the ruins for decades mourned its loss, however, as the evidence suggested there is not much left to celebrate.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 21036.html

[Anthea]

2 wrongs do not make a right

What ISIS did to this historical site was very wrong

BUT

What the world did by not making any effort to stop the destruction was even worse

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[Anthea]

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[Anthea]

Drone footage reveals extent of damage to ancient Nimrud site in Iraq by ISIS

Drone footage taken by the Associated Press over the ancient northern Iraqi site of Nimrud shows the extent of the damage it suffered at the hands of Islamic State group (ISIS) militants.

Leila Salah, head of the heritage building department at the Nineveh Antiquities Directorate, who had recently visited Nimrud, said on Saturday up to 70 percent of the site had been damaged.

But she added that because so much of the rubble had been left on the site it was possible to reconstruct it to what it looked like before but it would take years and cost millions of dollars.

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UNESCO, the United Nation's cultural agency, has already offered help, which will be used to put a fence around and guard the site as it is now completely unprotected.

Nimrud, also known as Kalhu, is an ancient Assyrian city located 20 miles south of Mosul.

It was a flourishing population center until the 7th century BC.

http://rudaw.net/english/middleeast/iraq/041220161