Sunday, March 8, 2015

Race in Iraq and Syria to Record and Shield Art Falling to ISIS

New York Times

- ‎2 hours ago‎

BAGHDAD - In those areas of Iraq and Syria controlled by the Islamic State, residents are furtively recording on their cellphones damage done to antiquities by the extremist group.

Race in Iraq and Syria to Record and Shield Art Falling to ISIS

By ANNE BARNARDMARCH 8, 2015

The National Museum of Iraq, which reopened last month in Baghdad, installed iron bars to protect galleries of ancient artifacts. Credit Sabah Arar/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

BAGHDAD — In those areas of Iraq and Syria controlled by the Islamic State, residents are furtively recording on their cellphones damage done to antiquities by the extremist group. In northern Syria, museum curators have covered precious mosaics with sealant and sandbags.

And at Baghdad’s recently reopened National Museum of Iraq, new iron bars protect galleries of ancient artifacts from the worst-case scenario.

These are just a few of the continuing efforts to guard the treasures of Iraq and Syria, two countries rich with traces of the world’s earliest civilizations.

Yet only so much can be done under fire, and time is running out as Islamic State militants speed ahead with the systematic looting and destruction of antiquities.

In just a few days last week, officials said, the group, also known as ISIS or ISIL, destroyed parts of two of northern Iraq’s most prized ancient cities, Nimrud and Hatra. On Sunday, residents said militants destroyed parts of Dur Sharrukin, a 2,800-year-old Assyrian site near the village of Khorsabad.

Islamic State militants have called ancient art idolatry that must be destroyed. But they also loot antiquities on a large scale to raise money, according to officials and experts who track the thefts through local informants and satellite imagery.

“Everything is dealt with for its value,” said Amr al-Azm, a former antiquities official in Syria who now works with the Safeguarding the Heritage of Syria and Iraq Project, an international consortium. “If it has propaganda value they exploit it for propaganda. If they can sell it, they sell it.”

Archaeologists and preservationists, used to battling mundane enemies like weather and development, lament that in areas held by the Islamic State there is little they can do but document the destruction.

“A fool criminal can come with one hit of a hammer and destroy all our efforts, and we can do nothing,” said Qais Hussein Rashid, deputy minister for tourism and antiquities. “It’s a great grief.”

Some have even called for airstrikes, not the usual province of Iraq’s cultural elite. Mr. Rashid and his boss, the minister, Adel Shirshab, both called for American-led coalition warplanes to strike militants approaching other historic sites.

On Sunday, the officials took their latest step in seeking designation of the ruins of ancient Babylon as a Unesco world heritage site, hoping for a measure of protection by the United Nations.

Yet the prospect feels like thin armor given the damage wrought to other Unesco designated sites, like Hatra in Iraq, and, the Krak des Chevaliers crusader castle and the Old City of Aleppo in Syria. Those Syrian sites are victims not of the Islamic State, but of four years of conflict between government and opposition forces, who shelled them and used them for cover.

Now, Iraq’s cultural institutions are “on the front lines against terrorism,” Mr. Shirshab said, fighting a “barbarian invasion that is targeting our heritage.”

But Iraq, he said, has survived “many invaders.”

He was not referring only to Hulagu Khan, the Mongol conqueror who razed the world’s greatest library and some of its finest buildings when he sacked Baghdad in 1258. (At the time, Baghdad was the seat of the Islamic caliphate, while today the Islamic State is merely a self-declared caliphate.)

There was also the United States invasion in 2003, when American troops stood by as looters ransacked the Baghdad museum, a scenario that, Mr. Shirshab suggested, is being repeated today. He spoke as Jeff Allen, a program director at the World Monuments Fund, ceremonially handed over a thick set of plans, produced with Iraqi conservators, for the preservation of the Babylon site.

The document addresses challenges that have long threatened Babylon: from brick thieves to railroad and pipeline construction. The solutions are mundane, like creating a single government agency authorized to protect antiquities.

Invaders bent on wholesale destruction, Mr. Allen said dryly, were “beyond the scope of the plan.”

Luckily, Babylon and other sites like the ziggurat of Ur are south of Baghdad, where the national government is more firmly in control. Only the military can keep those sites safe, said Hadi Moussa, an employee at the Babylon site.

“This is Hulagu,” he said comparing the modern invaders to an ancient one. But he added that an inscription on Babylon’s gate dedicated to the goddess Ishtar read: “Ishtar will defeat her enemies.”

The Babylon preservation plan also includes new documentation of the site, including brick-by- brick scale drawings of the ruins. In the event the site is destroyed, Mr. Allen said, the drawings can be used to rebuild it.

But there are no equivalent drawings of Hatra and Nineveh. After years of neglect and sanctions during Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, and the political chaos after his downfall, Iraq was behind international standards in cataloging antiquities and archaeological sites, a process that can help retrieve stolen objects or restore damaged ones.

The American invasion alerted archaeologists to what needed protecting. After damage and looting at many sites, documentation and preservation accelerated. One result was that the Mosul Museum, attacked by the Islamic State, had been digitally cataloged. Items not seen destroyed on video were presumed looted, and a list has been passed to law enforcement, said Katharyn Hanson, a University of Pennsylvania archaeology fellow working with the consortium.

Around 2005 in Syria, Mr. Azm helped start similar projects amid fears that country would face the next American invasion. But the work was never finished, said Mr. Azm, who now opposes the Syrian government and teaches at Shawnee University in Ohio.

He oversees an informal team of Syrians he has nicknamed the Monuments Men, many of them his former students. They document damage and looting by the Islamic State, pushing for crackdowns on the black market. Recently, the United Nations banned all trade in Syrian artifacts.

Mr. Azm also worked with curators at the Ma’arra Mosaics Museum in Ma’arrat an Nu’manin the northern Syrian province of Idlib, who, in what so far is a rare success story, have safeguarded the mosaics there.

The preservation consortium trained and financed the curators who sealed the mosaics and barricaded them behind sandbags — not sturdy enough to withstand a direct hit, but a measure of protection and a barrier to thieves.

The town is held by the Al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front. But a small local insurgent group occupies it, cooperating with the curators, Mr. Azm said.

Mr. Azm said his former colleagues still working for the Syrian government are doing their best. There have been reports that as the Islamic State approached, museum officials spirited valuable artifacts out of Deir al-Zour on a military plane along with the bodies of slain soldiers.

In Iraq, similar efforts have taken place. War interrupted courses Professor Hanson helped teach at the Iraqi Institute for the Conservation of Antiquities and Heritage in Erbil on how to document museum collections and archaeological sites.

Now, Iraqi colleagues teach conservators and concerned residents simple techniques to use in areas controlled by the Islamic State, such as turning on a cellphone’s GPS function when photographing objects, to help trace damage or theft, or to add sites to the “no-strike” list for warplanes.

Also in Erbil, the Rev. Nageeb Michael, a Dominican priest and a scholar at the Digital Center for Eastern Manuscripts, works to digitize historic Assyrian Christian manuscripts. He had worked in Qaraqosh, an Assyrian Christian town in northern Iraq, but fled when the Islamic State took over. Other scholars catalog artifacts that displaced residents have managed to safeguard.

In another cultural salvo against the Islamic State, officials reopened the national museum last week after 12 years of repairs and ahead of schedule.

On Sunday, Qais Abdelkareem, 26, a gardener from the impoverished Sadr City district of Baghdad who helped plant petunias and pansies for the museum’s opening, went inside for the first time. “This is Iraq’s history,” he said, admiring stone tools made tens of thousands of years ago. “You can say it’s the world’s history.”

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