Isis attacks on ancient sites erasing history of humanity, says Iraq

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/09/iraq-condemns-isis-destruction-ancient-sites

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The Iraqi antiquities ministry has acknowledged reports of a new attack by Islamic State militants on an ancient Assyrian city north-east of Mosul, reiterated calls for the international community to intervene and condemned the jihadi group for “erasing the history of humanity”.

There have been reports that Isis bulldozed landmarks in the ancient city of Dur Sharrukin, now called Khorsabad. The ministry said it was in keeping with the militant group’s “criminal ideology and persistence in destroying and stealing Iraq’s antiquities”.

Related: Outcry over Isis destruction of ancient Assyrian site of Nimrud

Dur Sharrukin is a former capital of the Assyrian empire in Nineveh that dates back to the 8th century BC.

“The hand of terrorism insists upon erasing the history of humanity by erasing the heritage of the land of the two rivers amid the shock and astonishment of the world,” the ministry said in a statement.

“We have warned previously and warn now that these gangs with their sick, takfiri ideology will continue to destroy and steal artefacts as long as there is no strong deterrent, and we still await a strong international stand to stop the crimes of Daesh that are targeting the memory of humanity,” it added, referring to the militant group by its Arabic acronym.

Last week Isis bulldozed the ancient city of Nimrud, also near Mosul, which the militant group conquered in a lightning advance last summer.

The previous week the group released a video of its fighters toppling and smashing ancient Assyrian statues in Mosul museum and destroying a winged bull near the ancient Nergal gate to Nineveh.

Over the weekend the group attacked the 2,000-year-old fortress city of Hatra.

Related: Isis fighters destroy ancient artefacts at Mosul museum

On Sunday Iraq’s tourism and antiquities minister, Adel Shirshab, called for air strikes by the US-led coalition to protect the country’s heritage.

“Our airspace is not in our hands. It’s in their hands,” Shirshab told reporters, according to Reuters. “I am calling on the international community and coalition to activate its air strikes and target terrorism wherever it exists.”

Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, described the sites’ desecration as a “war crime”. His spokesman said on Sunday: “The secretary general urgently calls on the international community to swiftly put a stop to such heinous terrorist activity and to counter the illicit traffic in cultural artefacts.”

Eleanor Robson, professor of ancient Near Eastern history at University College London, who has done extensive archaeological work in Iraq and returned last week from a trip to the country’s south, said air strikes were unlikely to succeed in protecting the monuments, and the focus instead ought to be on retaking the province of Nineveh.

She said that initially guards posted on the major sites by the antiquities ministry had continued to do their job after the Isis takeover, but the group then beheaded the Nineveh sites’ chief of security in October, and at any rate the guards were equipped to tackle looters rather than “crazed fanatics with machine guns”. “In the short term I think we have to just sit it out,” she said.

Robson said Isis was persisting with the destruction of artefacts because it was a “propaganda winner” that elicited strong reactions, but she said ignoring the issue may also lead to an escalation in the destruction.

She said Isis could not erase the millennia of history below the ancient ruins – archaeological layers that the group could not get to. But she said she was particularly worried about the damage in Hatra, which is built of stone and is well preserved, with no archaeological layers beneath it.

She said the other major site under threat from the militants was Ashur, a Unesco world heritage site on the banks of the Tigris not far from Mosul, named after the chief god of the Assyrian pantheon.

Separately, a force led by Shia militias and backed by the Iraqi army and Sunni tribal fighters has scored modest gains in an offensive against the Isis stronghold of Tikrit, south of Mosul. The pro-government fighters took control of Bouajil and Dawr, two areas on the approach to Saddam Hussein’s home town and thought to be key Isis-held territories.

Isis vandals want to turn the clocks back to ‘year zero’

Taking bulldozers and sledgehammers to irreplaceable Assyrian antiquities is not just another way for Isis to attract attention or a PR novelty after its beheading and immolation videos.

Destroying some of the world’s greatest archaeological and cultural treasures is something that flows from a fanatically purist interpretation of Sunni Islam as first laid down in 7th-century Arabia and revived more than a millennium later.

Early Islam defined itself against the age of jahiliyyah (ignorance) that preceded the prophet Mohammad, who smashed idols in the name of monotheism, as, before him, did the Jewish patriarch Abraham – hence the Old Testament ban on “graven images”. Both religions promoted iconoclasm in the service of one God. Christians, who saw Jesus as the incarnation of God, were more relaxed about his portrayal.

Islam evolved until the Wahhabi movement, founded by Muhammad ibn Abdel Wahab in the 18th century, aimed to purify the faith by returning Muslims to what he believed were its original principles as typified by al Salaf al Salih (the pious forebears). He rejected what he saw as pagan accretions introduced by bid’a (innovation) and shirk (idolatry or polytheism), which detracts from the absolute transcendence of God.

Abdel Wahab also revived interest in the works of the 13th-century scholar Ibn Taymiyyah, who came to be seen as the mentor of the Salafi-jihadi world view, and the doctrine of takfir – permitting the killing of anyone deemed to be an apostate.

The influence of Wahhabism meant that 90% of Islamic monuments, holy places, tombs and mausoleums in the Arabian peninsula were destroyed on the grounds that they were “polytheistic”. In 1924, Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud occupied Mecca and destroyed the grave of Khadijah, the prophet Muhammad’s wife, and that of his uncle, Abu Talib. In Medina, he demolished the mausoleum over the graves of the prophet Muhammad’s descendants, including that of his daughter, Fatimah.

Strikingly, the Isis department responsible for destroying antiquities is called the committee for the promotion of virtue and prevention of vice – the same name as the official Saudi body charged with enforcing morality.

Isis not only rejects religious shrines of any sort and condemns Iraq’s majority Shia Muslims as heretics, but takes a “year zero” attitude to the areas it controls. This explains its readiness to eliminate any traces of pre-Islamic Assyria.

The assault on Iraq’s ancient heritages has been compared to the Taliban’s destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001. Yet the damage wreaked by Isis, not just on ancient monuments but also on rival Muslim places of worship, has been far more extensive. Last July, it destroyed the tomb of the prophet Jonah in Mosul. Isis has also attacked Shia places of worship and last year gave Mosul’s Christians an ultimatum to convert to Islam, pay a religious levy or face death by the sword. It has also targeted the Yazidi minority in the Sinjar mountains west of Mosul.

The rise of Isis has even generated fears for the fate of splendid Roman ruins in Libya, where Sufi shrines have been vandalised.

Ian Black