A GIRL THROWS AWAY HER MOTHER’S VEIL AS A MOSUL DISTRICT UNDER ISIL RULE IS LIBERATED.
IRAQI FORCES CONTINUE THEIR PUSH TO RECAPTURE THE CITY.
MOSUL, IRAQ • The antiquities museum in the Iraqi city of Mosul is in ruins. Piles of rubble fill exhibition halls and a massive fire in the building’s basement has reduced hundreds of rare books and manuscripts to ankle-deep drifts of ash.
The museum now effectively marks the front line in the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant for Mosul’s western half after Iraqi forces retook it during a push up along the Tigris River in fierce house-to-house combat.
Troops have turned one of its halls and its garden into a makeshift base, placing machine-gunners at the building’s corners under olive trees and blocking nearby roads with rubble, old cars and mounds of dirt.
Initial advances in Mosul’s western neighbourhoods have been slow as Iraqi forces attempt to conduct simultaneous operations that force ISIL to spread out their defences.
Civilians were trickling out of the area carrying their possessions in overstuffed suitcases.
“The situation is not good, honestly. There is so much destruction,” Iman Issam said as she fled with her teenage daughter after Tuesday’s assault.
At the museum, two Iraqi archeologists confirmed that many of the artifacts destroyed were the original ancient stone statues dating back thousands of years, rather than replicas as some Iraqi officials and experts previously claimed.
ISIL captured Mosul in 2014 and released a video the following year showing fighters smashing artifacts in the museum with sledgehammers and power tools. The voice narrating the video justified the acts with verses from the Qur’an referencing the prophet Muhammad’s destruction of idols in the Kaaba.
The sacking of the Mosul museum was just a single act in nearly three years of systematic destruction of Iraq’s cultural heritage at the hands of ISIL. The militants levelled ancient palaces, temples and churches throughout Nineveh province and beyond, often releasing videos boasting of their acts. ISIL has even demolished some mosques, saying they were used to venerate saints, which ISIL considers a form of polytheism.
Inside the Mosul museum’s main exhibition hall, the floor was littered with the jagged remains of an ancient Assyrian bull statue and fragments from cuneiform tablets.
“These are the remains of a lamassu and the lions of Nimrud,” Layla Salih, an Iraqi archaeologist and former curator of the Mosul museum said as she examined AP photographs of the remains. Salih said when ISIL took over Mosul, the museum housed two massive lamassu statues — winged lions recovered from the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud.
“They were priceless.” she said, “They were in perfect condition.”