DUBAI: On Feb. 26, 2015, disturbing footage emerged from northwestern Iraq showing Daesh militants smashing pre-Islamic artefacts and burning ancient manuscripts at the Mosul Cultural Museum.
The terrorist group had seized control of the multi-ethnic city the previous year, and had set about looting everything of value and destroying anything that failed to conform to its warped ideology.
Priceless objects, spread across the museum’s three central halls, had told the singular narrative of Iraq as a land of remarkable civilizations from the Sumerians and the Akkadians to the Assyrians and the Babylonians.
A member of the Iraqi forces holds a damaged artifact in the museum on March 13, 2017. (AFP)
“I remember my first time there,” Richard Kurin, an ambassador-at-large for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, told Artnet News. “It was a total war zone.” He was among the first to visit the museum after the occupation ended.
A joint Iraqi-Smithsonian team works to document the damage in the Mosul Cultural Museum’s Assyrian Hall in February 2019. Photo courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution.
In addition to missing artifacts, some 25,000 volumes from the museum library had been burned and the buildings themselves had suffered considerable damage, most notably an 18-foot-long hole in the floor of the Assyrian hall, caused by a bomb. In minutes, ISIS had wrought destruction that would take years to repair.