Rubble and ash in Mosul museum retaken from ISIL
— 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. 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.
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 Mohammed’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.
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.
“They were priceless,” she said, “they were in perfect condition.”