Islamic State fighters have looted and bulldozed the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud, the Iraqi government said yesterday, in their latest assault on some of the world’s greatest archaeological and cultural treasures.
A tribal source from the nearby city of Mosul said the Sunni Islamists, who dismiss Iraq’s pre-Islamic heritage as idolatrous, have pillaged the 3,000-year-old site on the banks of the Tigris river, once capital of the world’s most powerful empire. The assault against Nimrud came just a week after the release of a video showing Islamic State supporters smashing museum statues and carvings in Mosul, the city they seized last June.
The UN cultural agency Unesco condemned Islamic State’s actions as “cultural cleansing” and a war crime. The government in Baghdad said the fighters were defying “the will of the world and the feelings of humanity”.
Destroyed city dates back to 13th century BC
“In a new crime in their series of reckless offences they assaulted the ancient city of Nimrud and bulldozed it with heavy machinery, appropriating archaeological attractions dating back 13th century BC,” the antiquities ministry said.
Nimrud, about 30km south of Mosul, was built around 1250BC. Four centuries later it became capital of the neo-Assyrian empire – at the time the most powerful state on earth, extending to modern-day Egypt, Turkey and Iran.
Many of its most famous surviving monuments were removed years ago by archaeologists, including colossal Winged Bulls which are now in London’s British Museum and hundreds of precious stones and pieces of gold which were moved to Baghdad. But ruins of the ancient city remain at the northern Iraqi site, excavated by a series of experts since the 19th century.
“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 Mosul tribal source said. “There used to be statues and walls as well as a castle that Islamic State has destroyed completely.”
Archaeologists have compared the assault on Iraq’s cultural history to the Taliban’s destruction of Afghanistan’s giant Bamiyan Buddha statues in 2001. But the damage wreaked by Islamic State is even more relentless and wide-ranging.
Describing Iraq’s history as “the heritage of the whole of humanity”, Unesco chief Irina Bokova said: “The deliberate destruction of cultural heritage constitutes a war crime.”
Last week’s video showed fighters toppling statues and carvings from plinths in the Mosul museum and smashing them with sledgehammers. It also showed damage to a huge statue of a bull in Nineveh. Iraqi officials said Islamic State had kept many artefacts to sell to antiquities smugglers and raise revenue.
Modern day Iraq was one of the birthplaces of civilisation, with agriculture and writing pioneered on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers more than 5,000 years ago. Many of the cities and empires mentioned in the Bible's Old Testament were in what is now northern Iraq. In the south, sheltered from Islamic State depredation but still damaged by years of conflict and theft, lie Babylon – site of Nebuchadnezzar's Hanging Gardens – and Ur, birthplace of the Biblical patriarch Abraham,