A Legacy in RuinsPrint
What now for Iraq’s Mosul Museum, recently liberated from ISIS?
By Cathy Otten
June 5, 2017
The only way into the Mosul Museum, as I discovered a few months ago,
A Legacy in RuinsPrint
What now for Iraq’s Mosul Museum, recently liberated from ISIS?
By Cathy Otten
June 5, 2017
The only way into the Mosul Museum, as I discovered a few months ago, was to crawl through a hole in the wall, accessed from an alleyway that cuts between the museum and its former administrative buildings. At the end of the alley is an Iraqi Federal Police barricade; beyond that are the narrow streets of Mosul’s old town and the Great Mosque of al-Nuri, where ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi gave his infamous July 2014 sermon after the jihadist group conquered the city. In March, Iraqi forces retook the museum, and I was granted access to the site with two colleagues. The surrounding neighborhood was blackened, destroyed, still unsafe. We were told to watch out for ISIS snipers, and the sound of gunfire shook the stillness. Only Iraqi Federal Police were wandering about, though I could also hear birdsong coming from the museum’s garden, where rosebushes and fig and olive trees had been planted in homage to the gardens of ancient Nineveh, around which the modern city of Mosul arose.
Inside the museum, I found the floor of the Assyrian gallery carpeted with shards of stone inscribed with cuneiform, remnants of the tablets that told the stories of Mesopotamia. In the gallery devoted to the city of Hatra, capital of the first Arab kingdom, the plinths bore no pedestals or statuary. It was here that ISIS fighters in 2015 filmed themselves smashing objects with sledgehammers. Nearby is a gigantic hole where explosives tore through an Assyrian winged bull statue that was too large to destroy by hand. Below that hole, in the basement, the floor of the museum’s library was thick with ash. The walls were licked black with fire, and the air was hot and sweet with the smell of burnt paper and plastic. Some 25,000 books had been destroyed.
Because of the building’s height, ISIS used it as a sniper’s nest. When the museum was retaken in March, Iraq’s Federal Police found bodies of ISIS fighters among the rubble, said Wisam Fadil of the force’s Third Division as he trod around the ruins. He’s from Baghdad, but for him, these objects transcend region: they are remnants of a shared, ancient past.
ISIS fighters announced their caliphate at the end of June 2014, after seizing Mosul, and began to impose dogmatic religious codes and punishments upon the people of the region. Since the worship of stones or images depicting gods or humans was now strictly forbidden, ISIS destroyed shrines and temples, particularly those of Shia Muslims and Yazidis, and looted objects that could be carted away. Now in Iraq, the group’s gains are being reversed. Neighborhood by neighborhood, Mosul is falling back under Iraqi government control, although at great cost to its people, who are being bombarded from all sides. ISIS fighters regularly kill civilians trying to escape. Not long after the museum was retaken, an American airstrike, part of the war against ISIS, killed more than 100 civilians sheltering in a house in western Mosul. Saba Omeri, a former museum worker and native of the city, spoke about the tension between protecting heritage and human lives. For her, the deaths of neighbors and friends and the forced displacement of the city’s ancient Christian community have been far more tragic than the loss of the museum’s pieces.
Despite the risks, staff members have returned to survey the damage and, most notably, what’s not there. Empty walls were once filled with Neo-Assyrian bas-reliefs and tablets and sculptures from Hatra. Most of the 115 or so objects in the galleries and another 200 in storage were looted, though only 18 or so pieces were destroyed, said former museum curator Leila Salih. She has hope that some of the objects can be recovered. The storerooms included tiles from Nineveh, pottery, jars, and Islamic decorative objects. Some of these pieces have already been found elsewhere in the city, she said, along with documents detailing illegal excavations.
“How many countries in the world went through four wars within 30 years?” asked Iraqi archaeologist Lamia al-Gailani when I spoke to her later. She reeled off a list of wars, civil wars, and invasions that have killed and displaced Iraqis and damaged the region’s cultural heritage. But the systematic and deliberate destruction by ISIS was something completely different, she said. “It is an ideology they have to erase history.”
Another expert in Iraqi and Syrian archaeology with whom I spoke, Smithsonian fellow Katharyn Hanson, added: “In the past you could look at the skyline in Mosul and see the different minarets and tops of the different shrines and see that diversity reflected. You could walk through the halls of the Mosul Museum and see that diversity of people who lived in northern Iraq, and different interpretations of the past, not just the one homogenized interpretation of Isl