Assessing the damage: Isis blew up a carved platform in the museum’s Assyrian Hall, leaving an enormous crater Sebastian Meyer/Smithsonian Institution
When Pope Francis recently visited Mosul Iraq’s most diverse city, with historic Muslim, Christian, Jewish and Yazidi communities it was a piercing reminder of how its religious pluralism was targeted by the Islamic State (Isis). Occupying the city for three years, Isis’s fundamentalist fighters waged a battle for absolute control.
By the time Mosul was liberated by Iraqi government forces in July 2017, most of the artefacts in the Mosul Cultural Museum had been destroyed or looted. An international partnership was quickly launched to try and salvage what remained, coordinated by specialists from the Smithsonian Institution, the Musée du Louvre, the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage and the Aliph Foundation, which gave $1.3m in funding. The project has now entered its second phase: the reconstr
UAE announces $3b investment in Iraq
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What did Pope Francis achieve in his visit to Iraq?
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There are few obvious reasons to go to Tripoli, Lebanon’s second-largest city.
Coming from the motorway in the south, one only sees scanty housing blocks. During the war in Syria, supporters and opponents of Bashar al-Assad clashed in the city’s east. Besides, one wonders, isn’t Beirut actually the symbol of Lebanese lust for life?
But then there is the old town with its lively souks, hundreds of years of history, the port quarter and the crazy utopias of a world-famous architect.
Another reason to visit is Mira Minkara, probably Tripoli’s only female tour guide. The cosmopolitan and welcoming 41-year-old Mira guides friends, acquaintances and tourists through her home town. “It is my passion, I love it, but it is not easy in a country like ours, ” she says.