The antiquities museum in the Iraqi city of Mosul lies in ruins, with exhibition halls housing piles of rubble and the basement filled with ankle-deep drifts of ash.
Associated Press reporters were granted rare access to the museum on Wednesday after Iraqi forces retook it from the Islamic State group (ISIS) earlier this week.
They found the jagged remains of what appeared to have been an ancient Assyrian bull statue and fragments from cuneiform tablets.
ISIS captured Mosul in 2014 and released a video the following year showing fighters smashing artifacts in the museum with sledgehammers.
The extremists view such ancient relics as false idols.
Iraqi officials at the time said most of what the militants destroyed were copies, as much of the museum’s inventory had been moved to Baghdad for safe-keeping.
This view was seemingly contradicted on Wednesday.
Sergeant Yasser Hassan Yousef of the Iraqi Federal Police was with the units that retook the Museum on Tuesday.
Yousef said that ISIS “took the valuable archaeological artifacts, they took all the original pieces and all that remains is what you see.”
(AP)
