A long-term plan needed to repair Mosul heritage
paris — The city of Mosul is intertwined with human history, tracing its roots to 4,400 years ago when civilisation rose in fabled, fertile Mesopotamia.
Today, as Iraqi forces backed by an international coalition inch forward in their fight to recover Mosul from the Daesh group, historians are looking at how to save, repair or retrieve precious heritage after the militants ’ three-year reign.
At a meeting in Paris last week, Iraqi officials and dozens of experts from around the world agreed to coordinate efforts to restore Iraq’s cultural treasure.
But, they admitted, the road ahead will be hard and long.
“The main challenge is for Iraqis to deal with this task by themselves. It is important to empower the people,” said Stefan Simon, director of global cultural heritage initiatives at Yale university.
“It is a heart-breaking situation,” he added. “(...) Rehabilitation will take a very long time. They need patience. “
In 2014, at the zenith of Daesh’ self-declared “caliphate” in Syria and Iraq, more than 4,000 Iraqi archaeological sites were under the heel of fanatics.
In the Mosul region alone in northern Iraq, “at least 66 sites were destroyed, some were turned into parking lots, Muslim and Christian places of worship suffered massive destruction and thousands of manuscripts disappeared,” Iraq’s deputy minister for culture, Qais Rashid, said at the conference, hosted by Unesco. The most grievous blow has been suffered by the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud.
Eighty per cent of the site has been destroyed, by militants driving bulldozers and detonating explosives.
Nineveh, once the largest city in the world, has been 70-per cent destroyed.
As for Mosul itself, historians are quailing at the likely fate of the city’s museum, the second largest in Iraq and a treasure house of ancient artefacts. —