When Jabbar Jaafar watched video of ISIS members with sledge-hammers
smashing artifacts as old as antiquity, the Iraqi-born cultural activist
was outraged over a loss he described as immeasurable.
Jaafar's anger at the destruction of Iraqi artifacts, relics and
statues by terrorists prompted him and his colleague, Iraqi archeologist
Abdulamir Al Hamdani at Stonybrook University, to protest outside the
White House Tuesday with 100 other cultural activists. Jaafar and Al
Hamdani work with the group Saving Antiquities for Everyone, or SAFE, an
organization founded in 2003 in response to the looting of the Iraq
Museum during which thousands of objects were taken -- some 3,000 to
7,000 are still missing.
"I couldn't sleep that night," Jaafar said, after watching the
videotaped destruction by ISIS of artifacts in Mosul last month. "These
objects are as old as civilization."
"ISIS is destroying the heritage of mankind," said Jaafar, who came
from Iraq to the U.S. in 2008 and worked for the Iraqi Cultural Center
in northern Virginia. "These pieces -- more than 3,000 years old -- are
gone forever. They can never be replaced."
The latest target of the Islamic State is Hatra, a 2,000-year-old
city and archaeological site in northern Iraq that had parts demolished
by ISIS militants last week, according to Kurdish officials. The
terrorists damaged and looted the city one day after bulldozing the
historic city of Nimrud.
Hatra, located 68 miles southwest of the city of Mosul, was a large
fortified city during the Parthian Empire and capital of the first Arab
kingdom. A UNESCO world heritage site, Hatra is said to have withstood
invasions by the Romans in A.D. 116 and 198 thanks to its high, thick
walls reinforced by towers. The ancient trading center spanned 4 miles
in circumference and was supported by more than 160 towers. At its heart
are a series of temples with a grand temple at the center — a structure
supported by columns that once rose to 100 feet.
"The destruction of Hatra marks a turning point in the appalling
strategy of cultural cleansing under way in Iraq," said Irina Bokova,
the director-general of UNESCO, and Abdulaziz Othman Altwaijri, director
general of the Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization (ISESCO) in a joint statement.
"With this latest act of barbarism against Hatra, [the IS group]
shows the contempt in which it holds the history and heritage of Arab
people."
The Sunni extremist group, which currently controls about a third of
Syria and Iraq, is bent on demolishing any symbols it says promotes
idolatry and violates its interpretation of Islamic law.
A video ISIS released last week shows militants smashing artifacts in
the Mosul museum -- the majority of which came from Hatra. In January,
the terror group also burned hundreds of books from the Mosul library
and Mosul.
On Friday, the group looted artifacts from Nimrud, a 3,000-year-old
city in Iraq, and bulldozed it in a move United Nations Secretary
General Ban Ki-Moon declared "a war crime."
"Ancient Mesopotamia is really the cradle of civilization -- where we
saw the first farming, the first cities, the first writing," Jack
Green, chief curator at the Oriental Institute Museum at the University
of Chicago, told FoxNews.com.
"There's a huge amount of knowledge and that knowledge is being
destroyed systematically," Green said. "They’re not only destroying
images of things – like artwork – but they're also looting artifacts and
then smuggling them away."
The black market for ancient artifacts is a profitable avenue for ISIS as it continues to build its funds.
Green is urging people worldwide not to purchase antiquities, saying,
"You may be acquiring objects that were taken from these sites."
"If so, you are supporting ISIS," Green said.
"ISIS is destroying the heritage of mankind."- cultural activist Jabbar Jaafar
The international group The Antiquities Coalition on Wednesday called
for the U.S. and other nations to crack down on the sale of looted
artifacts, acts considered war crimes under international law.
“ISIS is arming its campaign of terror in part by selling the past
and robbing future generations of our history,” said Deborah Lehr,
co-founder of The Antiquities Coalition. “We must constrict the
terrorists’ ability to profit from the sale of plundered antiquities.
“If we don’t act now, there may be no past left to protect," she
added. "With each artifact looted and sold onto the international
market, only criminals, insurgents, terrorists — and the most
unscrupulous of collectors — profit. The rest of us all lose.”
The Islamic State's push to demolish history hasn't hit Baghdad,
where officials reopened Iraq's National Museum on Saturday -- more than
a decade after some 15,000 objects were stolen during the U.S.
occupation of the country. According to the AFP, the museum opened its
doors earlier than expected in response to the destruction of artifacts
in Mosul last month by ISIS.
"The events in Mosul led us to speed up our work and we wanted to
open it [the museum] today [Saturday] as a response to what the gangs of
IS did," Qais Hussein Rashid, the deputy tourism and antiquities
minister, told AFP.
"This is a very happy day," he said.
The museum, also known as the Baghdad Archaeological Museum, contains
exhibits ranging from bone and stone tools used 100,000 years ago by
Stone Age hunter-gatherers in modern-day northern Iraq, artifacts from
the Sumerian and Old Babylonian dynasties, including 5,000-year-old
carved limestone statues, and numerous relics and treasures from
Babylon, the rise of Islam more than 1,000 years ago and modern times.
Iraqi museums, mosques, churches, schools and government buildings
are awash in priceless artifacts, but the embattled nation's historians
and archaeologists fear for what is being lost every day. The
Baghdad Museum's website features a terse indictment of the terror group on an all black homepage.
"2015: ISIS destroys what is left of ancient history," it reads.