Iraq |IS militants destroy another UNESCO heritage site

The face of a woman stares down at visitors in the Hatra ruins, 320km north of Baghdad

Islamic State militants continued their campaign targeting cultural heritage sites in territories they control in northern Iraq, looting and damaging the ancient city of Hatra just one day after bulldozing the historic city of Nimrud, according to Iraqi government officials and local residents. The destruction in Hatra comes as the militant Islamic group fended off an Iraqi army offensive in Saddam Hussein’s hometown and fought pitched battles in eastern Syria in an area populated by predominantly Christian villages.
Iraqi officials in the northern city of Mosul said Saturday that Islamic State militants have begun demolishing Hatra, a move UNESCO described as “cultural cleansing.”
An official with the ministry of tourism and antiquities’ archaeological division in Mosul told The Associated Press that multiple residents living near Hatra heard two large explosions Saturday morning, then reported seeing bulldozers begin demolishing the site. He spoke anonymously for fear of reprisal.
Saeed Mamuzini, a Kurdish official from Mosul, told the AP that the militants had begun carrying away artifacts from Hatra as early as Thursday and on Saturday, began to destroy the 2,000-year-old city.
Hatra, located 110 kilometers southwest of the city of Mosul, is a UNESCO world heritage site.
“The destruction of Hatra marks a turning point in the appalling strategy of cultural cleansing underway 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 Islamic State group currently controls about a third of Iraq and Syria. The Sunni extremist group has been campaigning to purge ancient relics they say promote idolatry that violates their fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic law. A video they released last week shows them smashing artifacts in the Mosul museum and in January, the group burned hundreds of books from the Mosul library and Mosul University, including many rare manuscripts.
The majority of the artifacts destroyed in the Mosul Museum attack were from Hatra. Sameer N. Yacoub and Vivian Salama , AP