Cultural heritage promotion and protection were national priorities, albeit instrumentalized for political aims, in the early years of Saddam Hussein’s rule. Subsequently, however, economic sanctions and post-conflict instability have prompted widespread looting of antiquities and a breakdown in state capacity to manage cultural assets.
From the founding of the Iraqi state up to 2003, cultural heritage was a constitutive feature of national state policy. Focused mostly on Iraq’s pre-Ottoman past, the state prioritized cultural heritage as a symbol of nationhood, and heavily funded and supported the heritage and arts sectors. However, the evolving manifestations of the Iraqi state over time – as a mandate, a monarchy, a republic, a dictatorship and a semi-functional democracy – have pushed and pulled the politicization of national heritage in different directions.
While the British Mandate authorities largely excluded Iraqis from the creation and consumption of knowledge about the new nation’s ancient past, the Ba’athist state co-opted pre-Ottoman heritage to tell a triumphalist story of national unity that downplayed diverse identities in favour of top-down imperial history. Because the past was instrumentalized for the purposes of nation-building, the archaeology and antiquities sectors in the 1970s and 1980s enjoyed unprecedented support from the state. Most famously, the former city of Babylon was a particular focus of Saddam Hussein’s attention, and the site of a problematic archaeological restoration. The then president of Iraq attempted to immortalize himself through archaeology, and exploited cultural heritage and the arts as part of his governing apparatus. In this case, the process illustrated how the use of heritage is inherently bound up with the self-fashioning of the state.
In the instability and uprisings that followed the 1991 Gulf War, provincial museums in southern Iraq were looted by criminals and organized gangs, and thousands of artefacts flooded the international antiquities markets. International sanctions from the early 1990s to 2003 devastated Iraq’s cultural heritage, with state funding for its protection, conservation and promotion plummeting to unprecedented lows. Central government heritage institutions were defunded, while heritage experts who could no longer support themselves left the service or fled the country. Others attempted to hold the service together, focusing on the essentials of preventing looting at remote archaeological sites even while a handful of influential Ba’athist figures were widely known to be running lucrative smuggling operations.
As international sanctions strangled Iraq’s economy, destitution gave rise to the looting of major archaeological sites, with large numbers of artefacts again coming on to international markets (as had been the case in 1991). Meanwhile, the establishment of the KRI in northern Iraq in 1991 led to the creation of parallel governance structures, including those with responsibility for archaeology and heritage. Since then, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has pursued the development of an independence-oriented Kurdish identity and related institutions, and has worked to incorporate cultural heritage within an ethno-nationalist political agenda. The region has also hosted increasing numbers of international archaeological projects, with the KRG even issuing its own excavation licences in an attempt to legitimize its control of newly secured territory. The process has continued to this day, including in so-called ‘disputed territories’ such as the provinces of Diyala, Kirkuk and Nineveh.
Further degradation of Iraq’s civil society and educated classes was a major outcome of sanctions, which also led to the collapse of the university system. International isolation resulted in a dramatic deskilling of academics and heritage professionals. This ‘brain drain’ meant that few were left to teach or be taught; where teaching continued, it was with meagre and outdated resources unchanged since the 1980s. On the international scene, in contrast, the forced break from excavation drove a huge increase in the publication of fieldwork results, and fostered the development of new theories, methodologies, technologies, and even whole fields such as cultural heritage studies – to which Iraqis had no access. The gap between Iraqi and international knowledge about the country’s past has still not closed, and has commonly been a contributing factor in the exploitation of Iraq and its cultural heritage. Examples of such damage are too many to list, though all are connected to and have been exacerbated by the destabilization of Iraq since the 1990s. As a repository of world knowledge, Iraq’s past and cultural heritage continues to be the target for predation, a situation highlighted by the US-based Museum of the Bible’s acquisition of more than 12,000 cultural artefacts from Iraq and Egypt that were later discovered to have been removed from those countries illegally, including the Gilgamesh ‘Dream Tablet’.
The Iraq National Archive and Library’s Jewish Archive – a collection of artefacts, manuscripts and books from Iraq’s Jewish communities – was removed to the US, supposedly for conservation. It has not yet been returned.
Cultural heritage was the subject of renewed attack in 2003 – most visibly symbolized by the pillaging of the Iraq Museum and other major cultural institutions in the spring of that year. The breakdown of authority and state institutions precipitated by the US occupation led to the systematic looting of archaeological sites in the south of the country. Tens of thousands of Iraqi cultural objects flooded international antiquities markets and private collections, despite attempts to rapidly strengthen international law in this area. Paintings, manuscripts and other nationally significant cultural objects encapsulating the history of Iraq were also stolen. Most prominently, the Iraq National Archive and Library’s Jewish Archive – a collection of artefacts, manuscripts and books from Iraq’s Jewish communities – was removed to the US, supposedly for conservation. It has not yet been returned. Major archaeological sites, including Babylon, Hatra, Samarra and Ur, were occupied by US forces and other foreign armies, which often inflicted heavy damage. Deliberate destruction of cultural heritage was also pursued by post-2003 political parties under the banner of de-Ba’athification, even if the removal of statues and monuments was unrelated to the Ba’ath Party.
Post-2003, armed attacks on icons of Iraqi cultural heritage have remained a common feature of the political and security landscape. Attacks on religious groups and symbols, such as the Our Lady of Salvation Church massacre in 2010, prompted large sections of Iraq’s Christian communities to flee the country, a response supported by some Christian leaders. From 2014, ISIS carried out attacks on places of worship, cemeteries and other representations of Iraqi communities. These actions were designed not only to destabilize the country but also to normalize inter-community violence and attacks against cultural, religious and ethnic groups. By so doing, ISIS was of course seeking to reshape Iraq in line with the organization’s fundamentalist agenda.
Generalized violence has damaged and traumatized Iraqi society, with a particularly heavy impact on non-dominant or minority cultural, religious and ethnic groups. For example, the Mandean and Baha’i communities have been uprooted because of the absence of security over the past two decades or so. Public displays of the Baha’i faith – a relatively new offshoot of Shia Islam – have disappeared as a result of continued threats, due to accusations by some armed and religious groups that its adherents are Shia imposters, heretics and servants of foreign interests. The historically significant Baha’i lodge in Sheikh Bashar, on the Karkh side of Baghdad, which was listed as a heritage building by SBAH, was demolished in 2013 by the Shia Endowment and a new Shia mosque built on the site.
A Baha’i activist in Baghdad, who works to raise awareness of the community’s history and cultural past, speaks of the effects of targeted and generalized violence since 2003:
In its extreme form, the erasure of cultural heritage has led to the levelling of entire archaeological, religious and cultural sites. Indeed, ISIS’s destruction of cultural heritage was integral to its politics, as the group sought to erase local identities and steer those provinces it controlled into a political direction conducive to its own interests. In effect, its ideology and actions sought to eradicate Iraq’s multicultural society through violence. ISIS forces and officials destroyed and damaged hundreds of places of worship, cemeteries, statues, and other religious and cultural sites. This process of erasure also included Sunni shrines. ISIS members also committed atrocities against the Yezidi and Shia Turkoman, as well as the Sunni and Shia Arab populations. Paradoxically, and despite its culturally exclusionary politics, ISIS also exploited Iraq’s antiquities as a source of income. Much of the tangible and intangible heritage in the affected provinces still lies in ruins.
While armed groups such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS have sought to reshape the cultural and, by extension, political landscape in Iraq through violence, heritage predation by Iraq’s political elites has also occurred with the legal protection of the state. Such predation has taken the shape of incremental appropriation and restructuring. As discussed above, changes in Babil, Baghdad, Erbil and Samarra have been pursued by sectarian political parties aiming to establish publicly demarcated ethnic and religious fiefdoms. In this sense, the control of cultural property and its folding into competing sectarian narratives – the subject of the next chapter – are themselves forms of symbolic violence, associated with the construction of intentionally differentiated boundaries between otherwise shared histories and communities.
