Ancient ruins now in hands of looters Islamic State vandalism just the start of woes for Nimrud Related 28 killed in Baghdad bombings•
nimrud, iraq» The giant winged bulls that once stood sentry at the nearly 3,000year-old palace at Nimrud have been hacked to pieces. The fantastical human-headed creatures were believed to guard the king from evil, but now their stone remains are piled in the dirt, victims of the Islamic State group’s fervor to erase history.
The militants’ fanaticism devastated one of the most important archaeological sites in the Middle East. But more than a month after the militants were driven out, Nimrud is still being ravaged, its treasures disappearing, piece by piece, imperiling any chance of eventually rebuilding it, an Associated Press team found after multiple visits in the past month.
With the government and military still absorbed in fighting the war against the Islamic State group in nearby Mosul, the wreckage of the Assyrian Empire’s ancient capital lies unprotected and vulnerable to looters.
No one is assigned to guard the sprawling site, much less catalog the fragments of ancient reliefs, chunks of cuneiform texts, pieces of statues and other rubble after IS blew up nearly every structure there. Toppled stone slabs bearing a relief from the palace wall that the AP saw on one visit were gone when journalists returned.
“When I heard about Nimrud, my heart wept before my eyes did,” said Hiba Hazim Hamad, an archaeology professor in Mosul who often took her students there. “My family and neighbors came to my house to pay condolences.”
Perhaps the only vigilant guardian left for the ruins is an Iraqi archaeologist, Layla Salih.
baghdad» A pair of suicide bombings minutes apart hit a central Baghdad market on Saturday, killing 28 people and wounding at least 54, prompting security forces to ban traffic from key streets at the center of the Iraqi capital, police and hospital officials said.
The twin attacks hit al-Sinak, a busy market selling car accessories, food and clothes as well as agricultural seeds and machinery. Minutes after the first suicide bomber detonated his explosives-laden belt, the second one struck amid the crowd that gathered, according to the officials.
The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attacks in al-Sanak in a statement posted by its Aamaq news agency, confirming that the blasts came from a pair of suicide bombers. She has visited it multiple times in recent weeks, photographing the destruction to document it and badgering nearby militias to take care of it. Walking with the AP across the broad dirt expanse of the ruin, she was calm, methodical and precise as she pointed out things she’d seen on previous visits that were no longer in place.
Still, Salih does not despair. She searches out reasons for optimism.
“The good thing is the rubble is still in situ,” she said. “The site is restorable.”
To an untrained eye, that’s hard to imagine, seeing the extent of the destruction that the Islamic State group wreaked in March 2015. Salih estimated that 60 percent of the site was irrecoverable.
The site’s various structures — several palaces and temples — are spread over 360 hectares (900 acres) on a dirt plateau. A 140foot-high ziggurat, or step pyramid, once arrested the gaze of anyone entering Nimrud. Where it stood, there is now only lumpy earth. Just past it, in the palace of King Ashurnasirpal II, walls are toppled, bricks spilled into giant piles. The palace’s great courtyard is a field of cratered earth. Chunks of cuneiform writing are jammed in the dirt. Reliefs that once displayed gods and mythical creatures are reduced to random chunks showing a hand or a few feathers of a genie’s wing.
During a Dec. 14 assessment tour by UNESCO, a U.N. demining expert peered at a hole leading to a tomb that appeared to be intact. It might be rigged to explode, the expert said, and the UNESCO crew backed away.
The militants boasted of the destruction in high-definition video propaganda, touting their campaign to purge their self-declared “caliphate” of anything they deemed pagan or heretical.
They dismantled the winged bulls, known as lamassu, as purposefully as any decapitation in Raqqa or Mosul. The bearded male heads of the statues are missing — likely taken to be sold on the black market as IS has done with other artifacts. They then wired the entire palace with explosives and blew it apart, along with the temples of Nabu and of the goddess Ishtar. It was a brutal blow to a site that gave the world a wealth of startling Mesopotamian art and deepened knowledge about the ancient Mideast.
Nimrud was a capital of the Assyrian and the city was the seat of power from 879-709 BC.