The magnificent Iraqi National Museum officially reopened last Saturday. It came after 12 years of reconstruction and efforts to restore almost one third of the recovered 15,000 pieces looted in April 2003, when Baghdad was occupied by invading US-led forces. As was widely reported at the time, American troops did nothing to protect the building, the ninth-largest museum in the world. According to Iraqi officials, the reopening was intended a response to the destruction by the Islamic State (IS) terror group of priceless antiquities at the Mosul Museum last week. The objects date back to between 1000 and 400 BCE, among them a huge winged bull, the guardian of Assyrian civilisation. Nineveh province, about 400 km north of Baghdad, has been controlled by IS since last June, and dozens of historic mosques, shrines and other sites have been destroyed. “We have been preparing to reopen the museum for the past couple of months. It should not be open to everyone,” Qais Hussein Rashid, deputy tourism and antiquities minister, was quoted as saying. “The events in Mosul led us to speed up our work, and we wanted to open it today as a response to what the gangs of Daesh [the Arabic acronym for IS] did,” he said. A video released by IS last Thursday of the destruction of the Mosul Museum sparked global outrage, with the UN cultural agency UNESCO calling for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council in efforts to protect archaeological sites in IS-controlled areas. Security Council Resolution 2199, passed earlier this year, reads: “Members of the Security Council reiterated their condemnation of the destruction of cultural heritage in Iraq and Syria, particularly by ISIL [IS], including targeted destruction of religious sites and objects, and noted with concern that ISIL and other individuals, groups, undertakings and entities associated with Al-Qaeda are generating income from engaging directly or indirectly in the looting and smuggling of cultural heritage items from archaeological sites, museums, libraries, archives and other sites in Iraq and Syria, which is being used to support their recruitment efforts and strengthen their operational capability to organize and carry out terrorist attacks.” Iraqi officials and parliamentarians have approached international organisations to assist in the protection of Iraqi archaeological sites, part of the world's cultural heritage. Torhan Mufti, an advisor to the Iraqi president, has joined with other intellectuals to establish the Iraqi Gathering for Protecting the Iraqi Heritage, an NGO. He told the Weekly that the intention is to register as an NGO so that it can begin its work protecting Iraqi heritage in coordination with Iraqi authorities and international organisations. “The destruction of the Iraqi heritage is targeting the Iraqi memory and history,” he said. Meanwhile, military operations began last week to liberate Salaheddin Province and its main city of Tikrit, about 160 km northwest of Baghdad, from IS forces. According to reports, tens of thousands of army troops, hashed (volunteers) and tribal forces are part of the operations. At the same time, the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) published a communiqué on March 2 stating that the special representative of the UN secretary-general for Iraq, Nickolay Mladenov, has urged the armed forces to do their utmost to spare civilians in Tikrit during the operations, and to protect their security and safety in line with international standards. “Military operations reinforced by international and Iraqi air support must be conducted with the utmost care to avoid civilian casualties, and with full respect for fundamental human rights principles and humanitarian law,” Mladenov said. He called on the Iraqi government and the international community to take urgent action to ensure that desperately needed humanitarian aid was provided and to ensure that all those who have fled from IS can safely return to their homes. In another communiqué regarding Iraqi casualty figures for February 2015, UNAMI said that a total of 1,103 Iraqis were killed and another 2,280 wounded in acts of terrorism and violence. The number of civilians killed was 611 (including 30 civilian police), and the number injured was 1,353 (including 29 civilian police). A further 492 members of the Iraqi army (including Peshmergas and militias fighting alongside the Iraqi army, but not including casualties from the Anbar operations) were killed and 927 injured. Baghdad was the worst-affected governorate, with 1,204 civilian casualties (329 killed and 875 injured). Diyala recorded 73 killed and 69 injured, Salaheddin 39 killed and 54 injured, and Nineveh 40 killed and 17 injured, UNAMI said. According to information from the health directorate in Anbar Province, the governorate suffered a total of 372 civilian casualties (81 killed and 291 injured). This included 23 killed and 196 injured in Ramadi and 58 killed and 95 injured in Fallujah. Iraqi civilisation has long been characterised by the theme of destruction and rebuilding. A tablet dating back to the Uruk period in 3200 BCE provides an account of the country being burnt by enemy forces. The queen mother was crying and her son, the king, kissed her hands and said, “Our country has been burnt twice. We rebuilt it from the ashes, and we will rebuild it again.” Kul Tepe, the hill of ashes, is an archaeological site about 15 km south of Kirkuk in northern Iraq. The hill is composed of seven layers of ashes, evidence that there was once a city there that was burnt to ashes and rebuilt seven times.
