Antiquities Lost, Casualties of War

◼ In Syria and Iraq, Trying to Protect a Heritage at Risk - New York Times

Yasser Tabbaa, a specialist on Islamic art and architecture, remembers taking many trips to a 13th-century shrine dedicated to the Imam Awn al-Din, in Mosul in northern Iraq. The building was one of the few to survive Mongol invasion, never mind the destructive effects of weather and time. And this shrine had a stunning vaulted ceiling, like a honeycomb.

“It is a beautiful pyramidal tower at the edge of the Tigris,” said Mr. Tabbaa, who taught at New York University Abu Dhabi and lives in Ann Arbor, Mich.

His heart fell this summer, however, when he saw an online video of the shrine exploding in a cloud of dust, blown up by the militant group the Islamic State.

“It is just gone,” he said, his voice trailing off.

Tracking the cultural treasures of Syria and northern Iraq has become a heartbreaking task for archaeologists and antiquity scholars. And the list of destroyed, damaged or looted works has only grown longer as the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, which seeks to create a caliphate, has pushed into northern Iraq. Sunni extremists like the Islamic State and others are deliberately wrecking shrines, statues, mosques, tombs and churches — anything they regard as idolatry....

But for all the looting damage, nothing scares scholars more than the Islamic State militants. “The speed with which they are moving into Iraq is really like the Mongols,” Ms. Canby of the Metropolitan Museum said. “It is brutal.”

The Islamic State and other extremists are motivated by the idea of punishing “shirk,” or idolatry. As a result, they have smashed Shia and Sufi sites, statues of poets, Mesopotamian relics from Assyria and Babylonia, and Sunni shrines that are outside the bounds of their narrow beliefs.

The destruction is also useful propaganda, proving their power, advertising their ideology and attracting international attention.