Led By Islam

"These books promote infidelity and call for obeying Allah. So they will be burned."
ISIS jihadi

Once one of the great cities of the Assyrian Empire, 2,500 years ago, Nimrud lies within Isis-held territory east of the Tigris river, 30 miles south of Mosul.

"There were so many statues at the site when I visited in the 1960s that we had to jump over them. They probably represent officials or priests, and they stood in temples in the ancient city."

 "I remember two whole rooms devoted to Hatra in the Iraq Museum."

"Those artifacts [looted by locals] get passed down to grandchildren. Eventually no one in the family wants them, they're sold, and museums can recover them."

"These things [treasures being destroyed by ISIS] are part of the history of humanity. If you destroy them, you're destroying the history of everyone."

Lamia al-Gailani Werr, Iraqi archaeologist, London

A video posted on the Internet on February 26 shows Islamic State militants destroying statues in Mosul Museum in Iraq. Dating from about 100 B.C. to A.D. 100, the figures were from nearby Hatra, now a UNESCO World Heritage site. Video still Balkis Press, SIPA, Associated Press

In Mosul, a city of a million people, mostly Sunni Iraqis, Iraq's second-largest city now held by ISIS, ethnic and religious minorities have fled the carnage that ISIS brought. And ISIS followers have destroyed 8,000 books found in libraries there. Books were piled in the streets and burned. Islamic State militants used electric drills to destroy a major archaeological site at the Nergal Gate at Nineveh, the sculpture of a mythical beast.

ISIS "considers culture, civilization and science as their fierce enemies", remarked Hakim al-Zamili, head of the Iraq parliament's security committee. And that much is most certainly true; culture, civilization and science are fiercely anti-Islamist. Their existence is a provocation to the brutally Medieval minds that guide the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, the logic and civility dismissive of the ISIS drive to destroy everything that culture and civilization and science exemplify.

Civilized and cultured people who are quick to come to the defence of Islam when Muslims speak of criticism of Islam as Islamophobia, insist that the Islamic State jihadists are not Muslims. That the religion they practise is not truly Islam, in their sensitive eagerness to mollify the hurt feelings of Muslims who are not religious fanatics, dangerous to other Muslims and the world at large. But the truth lies elsewhere; ISIS practices Islam as it was written, and Muslims believe that what was written is the word of their god.

Islam's demand is that its sacred texts be considered the literal truth, and obeyed as such. It represents itself as the only true faith, and any divergence from its principles are forbidden. Shariah law is, in and of itself based on a totalitarian ideology. It unifies state and religion and controls the lives of the faithful down to every last vestige of their existence; lives dedicated wholly to Islam and the total surrender to Islam's unquestionable directives.

Not only must other religions bow to Islam, but all symbols of those religions from the far distant past whose remnants are archaeological world treasures, to the religions worshipped around the world to the present day, must be destroyed, for their existence is displeasing to Islam. And so, the world heritage of ancient treasures that speak to the existence of culture, society, heritage and religion is slated for destruction by the world's most hate-ridden force.