ISIS and the Mosul Museum Video: What Was Really Destroyed

ISIS Video Shows Statues Smashed in the Mosul Museum (2015)

On 26 February 2015 the Islamic State group (ISIS, also called ISIL or Daesh) released a video of about five minutes filmed inside the Mosul Museum in northern Iraq. It showed militants toppling statues, smashing them with sledgehammers and grinding the face of a winged-bull guardian with a power drill. The video shocked archaeologists and the public worldwide and became one of the defining images of the group's war on Iraq's past.

Within days, specialists pointed out that many of the statues being broken were plaster casts, and that many originals had been moved to Baghdad years earlier. That does not make the loss trivial. Genuine Assyrian and Hatrene pieces were damaged, the same campaign burned thousands of books and manuscripts from Mosul's libraries, and in the following weeks ISIS bulldozed the ancient city of Nimrud. This page explains what the video showed, what was really lost, and what has happened since.

What the video showed

Mosul had fallen to ISIS in June 2014. The museum, founded in 1952 and housed in a purpose-built building since 1972, held around 2,200 objects, mainly from the Assyrian period and from Hatra, a Parthian-era city south-west of Mosul. It had been heavily looted in 2003 and was about to reopen after years of rebuilding when the militants arrived.

The video, carrying the logo of an ISIS media office and spread through accounts linked to the group, cut between scenes in the galleries and footage from the Nergal Gate at Nineveh, where a stone lamassu (a human-headed winged bull) was attacked with power tools.

Still from the February 2015 video: statues inside the Mosul Museum are pushed over and broken with hammers.

Among the objects shown was a winged-bull figure of the kind that guarded Assyrian palace and city gates in the 9th to 7th centuries BC. These lamassu were meant to protect against evil; a few of the best-preserved examples stand today in the British Museum, the Louvre and Baghdad's Iraq Museum.

A militant drills into the face of an Assyrian lamassu, a protective winged-bull deity dating to around the 9th century BC.

Why ISIS destroyed the statues

A speaker in the video justified the destruction by claiming the statues were idols, and said early Muslims had removed such objects after their conquests. The overwhelming majority of Muslim scholars and institutions rejected that view; these monuments had stood through more than a thousand years of Islamic rule in the region. ISIS used the same reasoning to blow up Muslim shrines it considered heretical, including the mosque and tomb associated with the prophet Jonah in Mosul in July 2014.

The destruction was also theatre. Filmed with care and released online, it was designed to show defiance, attract recruits and dominate the news. Meanwhile, according to UNESCO, US officials and researchers, the group profited from looting: smaller, portable antiquities were sold through smuggling networks, while large pieces that could not be moved were destroyed on camera.

The embedded news report above shows edited footage from the video. Some viewers may find the scenes distressing.

The militant who speaks in the video presents the destruction as the removal of idols, a claim rejected by mainstream Islamic scholarship.

Replicas and originals: what was really lost

Soon after the release, archaeologists studying the footage noticed iron rods inside some of the broken statues. Mark Altaweel of University College London explained that ancient originals do not contain such reinforcement, a sign that these pieces were modern plaster casts. Reports citing the British Institute for the Study of Iraq said many originals had been taken to Baghdad for safety.

The picture was not entirely reassuring. Atheel al-Nujaifi, the former governor of Nineveh province, said that most valuable works had been moved but that at least two genuine pieces, a winged bull and a statue known as the god of Rozhan, had been destroyed. The lamassu at the Nergal Gate in Nineveh was an original standing on its ancient site. When Iraqi forces retook the museum in 2017, they found it badly damaged, with some objects smashed and others apparently looted.

So the fair summary is this: the video exaggerated the scale of what was destroyed inside the museum, but it still recorded real and irreversible losses, and it was only one episode in a much wider campaign.

The burning of Mosul's libraries

The museum footage appeared a day after reports that ISIS had set fire to the Central Library of Mosul. Losses were reported at roughly 8,000 rare books and manuscripts, along with Iraqi newspapers from the early 20th century, Ottoman-era maps and books, and private collections donated by about 100 of the city's old families. Residents told reporters that in earlier raids militants had loaded books into trucks, leaving behind only religious texts they approved of.

Pieces of the lamassu crash to the floor during the attack shown in the video.

Libraries at the University of Mosul, a Sunni Muslim library and the Dominican monastery's collection were also reported damaged. Mosul's residents had protected their heritage before: after the 2003 invasion, people living near the Central Library hid manuscripts in their own homes to save them from looters. Under ISIS rule, doing the same could be punished by death.

Book stalls on al-Mutanabbi Street, Baghdad's historic book market. Iraq's long tradition of scholarship made the attacks on libraries especially painful.

Nimrud, Hatra and the wider campaign

The Mosul video was followed by more destruction. From early March 2015 militants bulldozed and blew up parts of Nimrud, the ancient Assyrian capital of Ashurnasirpal II, including its great palace and the lamassu at its gates; by the time the site was retaken, around 90% of the excavated area had been destroyed. Hatra was attacked in the same months, and in 2015 ISIS also blew up the Temple of Bel in Palmyra, Syria, and murdered the retired archaeologist Khaled al-Asaad there.

The attacks on heritage ran alongside attacks on people. The same advance in 2014 drove Assyrian and other Christians out of Mosul and the Nineveh Plains, and the United Nations and many governments have recognised ISIS crimes against Yazidis as genocide. The statues were the visible part of an effort to erase whole communities and their histories from the region.

UNESCO's then director-general, Irina Bokova, called the destruction at Nimrud a war crime, and in May 2015 the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution stating that deliberate destruction of cultural heritage may amount to one. The UN Security Council's Resolution 2199, passed in February 2015, had already banned trade in antiquities taken from Iraq and Syria.

Recovery since 2017

Iraqi forces recaptured Mosul in July 2017 after a long and destructive battle. Since then, the museum has been the focus of an international restoration effort: in 2018 the heritage-protection fund ALIPH committed about US$1.5 million to rehabilitate it with the Louvre, the Smithsonian Institution and Iraq's State Board of Antiquities and Heritage. A temporary exhibition opened in the restored Royal Hall in 2019, and the museum was formally reopened in 2020 while conservation work continued.

Restorers have been sorting and documenting the fragments left behind, with the aim of reassembling what can be saved. Digital projects have also recreated destroyed objects in 3D from photographs, so that even pieces that cannot be repaired are not entirely lost to future visitors and researchers.

Sources: Wikipedia, Mosul Museum; Wikipedia, Destruction of cultural heritage by ISIL; Artnet News, "Did ISIS Smash Fake Sculptures in Mosul?" (February 2015); original report and video by Daily Mail, with reporting from Reuters and the Associated Press.

Related: