Isis militants destroy ancient city of Nimrud

Islamic State fighters have looted and bulldozed the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud, the Iraqi government said, in their latest assault on some of the world’s greatest archaeological and cultural treasures.

A tribal source from the nearby city of Mosul told Reuters the ultra-radical Sunni Islamists, who dismiss Iraq’s pre-Islamic heritage as idolatrous, had 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 along with much of northern Iraq last June.

The United Nations 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.”

“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 13 centuries BC,” the tourism and antiquities ministry said.

Nimrud, about 30km south of Mosul, was built around 1250 BC. 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. British archaeologist Max Mallowan and his wife, crime writer Agatha Christie, worked at Nimrud in the 1950s.

“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 told Reuters.

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 being wreaked by Islamic State, not just to ancient monuments but also on some Muslim places of worship, is even more relentless and wide-ranging.

“This is yet another attack against the Iraqi people, reminding us that nothing is safe from the cultural cleansing underway in the country,” said Unesco chief Irina Bokova.

— Reuters

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