RESTORING MOSUL, ONE BYTE AT A TIME
▶ Digital technology is the key to rebuilding historic structures destroyed by ISIS in the Iraqi city
If they looked to the skies in 2015, the fighters of ISIS in their enclave of Mosul might have noticed a small drone circling overhead.
As the Iraqi army and Kurdish Peshmerga forces tightened the noose around the extremists’ stronghold, at the controls was not a soldier with his trigger finger on a Hellfire missile.
Instead, the drone was being flown by a team of digital archaeologists intent on discovering the extent of destruction of ancient monuments and sites after nearly two years of systematic and targeted cultural destruction.
Two years later, and with Mosul liberated but in ruins, the same team from Iconem, a French company that creates exact digital records of some of the world’s most endangered historic places, is joining the international effort to restore the battered city.
It is led by Unesco, which recently announced its Revive the Spirit of Mosul initiative to reconstruct the Old City, for “the physical infrastructure and restoring the dignity of its people”.
The re-conquest of Mosul and the violent iconoclasm of its occupiers have left a terrible scar on the Old City and its inhabitants. By some estimates, 11,000 civilians died, and the bodies of many ISIS fighters remain in the ruins of its buildings – structures still filled with explosive booby traps.
Among the historic sites lost or severely damaged was the 12th-century Great Mosque of Al Nuri and its celebrated minaret, Al Hadba, or “the hunchback”, named after its distinctive lean.
“The first challenge is the magnitude of the destruction,” says Louise Haxthausen, the director of the Unesco office in Iraq and its representative for Iraq.
“Cultural heritage was taken as a target by Daesh [ISIS] as part of their ideology of destruction, of fragmenting Iraqi society.”
“We want to ensure that this reconstruction process is not only about physical reconstruction, but also revival process for the people themselves. We don’t want to turn the Old City into a museum. We want it to be a lively place.
“We would also like this reconstruction process to contribute to social cohesion and reconciliation in the longer term.”
She spoke to The National before a conference at Paris-Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi called Heritage and New Technologies in the Arab World: How to Revive the Spirit of Mosul?
She was joined by Yves Ubelmann, founder and chief executive of Iconem, whose expertise is drawn from the team’s work on more than 100 sites globally.
Those include Mes Aynak, an ancient Buddhist settlement and monastery in Afghanistan. The ruins are in an area once used by Al Qaeda and still with significant Taliban activity.
What now threatens Mes Aynak – whose name translates as “little source of copper” – is a US$3 billion (Dh11.02bn) contract with China to extract the huge metal resources underneath the site and which will result in its total destruction.
After flying drones over the site, Iconem assembled hundreds of thousands of images to create a 3D digital model that virtually preserved Mes Aynak.
The team was also the first into Palmyra after ISIS was forced out of the World Heritage Site in Syria in March 2016. Again, using drones, Iconem recorded the ruins of monuments such as the Temple of Bel and the 3rd-century Arch of Triumph.
By comparing the fallen stones with older photographs of the monuments, Iconem has developed an algorithm that identifies them by shape and can virtually piece them back together. The hope is that one day this will be carried out for real.
With Mosul, the task has been more complex and urgent. It was two years before the city was liberated when Mr Ubelmann and his team went to work, joining Peshmerga forces less than 30 kilometres from the front line.
Using long-range fixed-wing drones and flying at nearly a kilometre high, they began capturing the extent of ISIL’s destruction. “It’s a little plane and hard to see,” says Mr Ubelmann. “Sometimes we got one bullet.”
Among the sites captured from the air was Nineveh, an Assyrian city that was once the largest in the world. The 3D computer model also featured the distinctive 3,000-year-old ziggurat, a pyramid-like structure that served as a temple. Several weeks later, ISIS destroyed the mound using bulldozers. “So we had the last pictures of the ziggurat,”says Mr Ubelmann. “And the only 3D model.”
Digital surveys are crucial to the success of the Mosul initiative, says Ms Haxthausen. “The city is heavily contaminated with explosive devices. You cannot do a tradition assessment, going house by house, because it would be too dangerous. If the old city was to be completely de-mined, it would take one year and cost $100 million dollars. So that is not something we can do, and we have to work in another way.”
At the launch of the Revive the Spirit of Mosul project in Kuwait in February, an appeal was made for long-term international donors. “Money is an issue,” she says. “Reconstructing the old city? I think it’s possible. We see a lot of interest and support already, but it’s going to cost a lot of money. We don’t know yet how much.”
The Unesco chief sees the reconstruction of Europe after the Second World War as a possible inspiration. “The more conventional approach to conservation is that authenticity is a key criterion, so if something is destroyed we cannot reconstruct [it],” she says.
“That is really changing, and that change started after the Second World War for some cities. Warsaw is very good example, where a decision was made to reconstruct.”
The destruction in Mosul included the Umayyad Mosque; the university library, where a quarter of a million books were burnt; and the Prophet Yunus Mosque, said to be the burial place of the Prophet Jonah.
While examining the ruins of the mosque, archaeologists noticed a nearby tunnel dug by ISIS. Following it underground, they found numerous artefacts and the lower half of two gigantic stone statues that represented lumasi, a deity with the winged body of a bull and a human head. Unwittingly, ISIS had uncovered a previously unknown Assyrian palace.
“Every time something is destroyed, we discover something else,” says Mr Ubelmann.