After the Islamic State captured the northern Iraqi city of Mosul in mid-2014, they unleashed a wave of devastating human suffering and unprecedented heritage destruction.
The Islamic State targeted many of Mosul’s most sensitive and important cultural heritage sites.
Most notoriously, in 2015 the Islamic State released a number of propaganda videos in which they had filmed themselves using sledgehammers to topple and destroy statues at the Mosul Museum, and using power tools to deface giant reliefs at the ancient archaeological site of Nineveh.
