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Mosul Cultural Museum rises from the ravages of Isis


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: ....

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