Closer look at artifacts ISIL is destroying
Iraqi workers clean an archaeological site in 2001 in Nimrud. The site was bulldozed by Islamic State militants Thursday, according to the government.(Photo: Karim Sahib, AFP/Getty Images)The Islamic State militants' path of destruction continues.They used heavy armed military vehicles to bulldoze the ancient city of Nimrud Thursday, according to a statement from Iraq's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.It's the latest in a string of acts by the militants aimed at destroying artifacts they consider idolatry.Photos: Artifacts the Islamic State is ruiningLast SlideNext SlideThe destruction has "a major impact on the heritage of the region," Jack Green, the chief curator of the Oriental Institute Museum at the University of Chicago and an expert on Iraqi art, told the AP."It's the deliberate destruction of a heritage and its images, intended to erase history and the identity of the people of Iraq, whether in the past or the present," he said.The ancient kingdom of Nimrud began around 900 B.C. and was destroyed in 612 B.C. It's on the Tigris River, just south of Iraq's second-largest city, Mosul, which the Islamic State captured in June.A video posted by the group in recent weeks shows militants using sledgehammers to knock over artifacts at the Mosul museum and destroying ancient Nineveh gates.Christopher Jones, a Ph.D. student in ancient near eastern history at Columbia University in New York, has methodically tracked on his website the damage to artifacts.The destruction of the lamassu sculptures, depicting "large-winged human-headed bulls" dating back to 704 and 690 B.C., are some of the greatest losses, according to Jones."They were some of the few lamassu left in their original locations to greet visitors to Nineveh the same way they would have greeted visitors in ancient Assyria," he wrote on his blog. There were reportedly lamassu at Nimrud as well, but Jones has not updated his blog with a reaction to those reports.Jones calls the damage in the Mosul museum "devastating" but says that in 2003, some of the smaller objects were relocated to the Iraqi Museum in Baghdad. Therefore, it's possible some of the artifacts destroyed were replicas.Contributing: Associated PressFollow @lagrisham on TwitterSee, hear chaos surrounding Harrison Ford plane crashMar 06, 2015
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