Unesco hosts talks on reviving Mosul’s cultural heritage after ISIS destruction
The UN will today hold a conference on how to revive Mosul’s cultural heritage and education after the city’s three-year battle against ISIS.
The long road to liberation came at a huge cost for Iraq, with towns and cities reduced to rubble and countless displaced people. Heavy air raids by the US-led coalition and ISIS booby traps added to the widespread destruction.
The Unesco meeting, Revive the Spirit of Mosul, will focus on restoring the city’s rich heritage, rehabilitating its education system and revitalising its cultural life, a spokesman for the agency told The National.
Audrey Azoulay, director general of Unesco, will open the conference in Paris alongside the Iraqi Secretary General of the Council of Ministers, Mahdi Al Alaq.
The event will be attended by politicians, including the UAE’s Minister of Culture and Knowledge Development, Noura Al Kaabi, and the Iraqi Minister of Culture, Fryad Rawandouzi.
Ms Azoulay said the conference would deal with the human dimension of the city’s rebuilding through culture and education.
“Only by restoring the shared cultural heritage and revitalising cultural and educational life will the people of Mosul be, once again, actors in the renewal of their country,” she said. “That is the ambition of this unprecedented initiative.”
The UAE announced in April that it would fund a $50 million (Dh183.3m) project to rebuild Mosul’s Grand Mosque of Al Nuri. The building, known for its eighth-century leaning minaret, was blown up by ISIS last year.
It was from Al Nuri that ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi declared a “caliphate” in 2014.
The Iraqi government estimates that Mosul needs at least $2 billion in reconstruction aid to repair roads, and rebuild homes, schools and hospitals destroyed in the fighting.
About 700,000 of Mosul’s population, estimated at two million before the insurgents seized the city, remain displaced.
“Iraq has lost a lot during the war,” Mosul resident and photographer Ali Al Baroodi told The National.
“We’ve lost our heritage, identity and archaeology in the war and I have always tried to support Mosul by documenting events through photographs.”
Mr Al Baroodi’s photographs will be on display during the conference.
He said Mosul was once an ethnically and religiously diverse city and he hoped the conference would produce initiatives that could return the city to its former glory.
In February, international donors and investors gathered in Kuwait to plan the rebuilding of Iraq. Baghdad received pledges of $30bn, mostly in credit facilities and investment, but fell short of the $88bn it said it needed to recover from three years of war.
The US claims the failure to help rebuild Iraq could undermine the country’s victory over ISIS as the economic and social problems could be exploited by extremists.
Prime Minister Haider Al Abadi declared victory in December but sleeper cells still operate in the country from sparsely populated areas, including desert regions near the border with Syria.