Revenues and benefits derived from cultural resources accrue to political and religious elites. This incentivizes elite rivalry over the exploitation of such resources and provides an opening for external powers to leverage offers of financial assistance.
Quota politics within Iraq’s state agencies have made ministries targets for resource extraction. A key example is that of the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Antiquities, control over which has been variously allocated (as an electoral windfall) to successive Shia, Sunni and Kurdish political parties. For example, between 2018 and 2021 parts of the ministry were under the control of Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, a political party and part of the Popular Mobilization Forces, whose members are also represented in the Iraqi parliament. Their primary interest appears to be exploitation of the ministry’s tourism assets, especially hotels, and authority over lucrative alcohol licences. The ministry’s cultural heritage remit appears to be of little value to Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, leaving the SBAH without strong political support and enabling other interest groups to take advantage of this gap. Other parts of the ministry are controlled by Kurdish, Sunni and Shia political actors who, while in some cases chosen on the basis of merit, are often appointed on the basis of their ethnicity and religion.
In addition to the organized extraction of resources by political parties, since 2003 the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Antiquities has repeatedly been marginalized as an institution. Inadequate budget allocations – particularly for the SBAH – have reduced capacities to address Iraq’s cultural heritage needs. A shortage of skills and resources has left central state heritage institutions unable to implement long-term plans for cultural recovery. As a result, the SBAH today is having to address one emergency after another. An official concerned with conservation at the SBAH, regarding those challenges, said:
Cultural heritage is one of Iraq’s richest resources, arguably second only to oil in its economic potential – but is also, therefore, widely vulnerable to exploitation if not adequately safeguarded. The Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Antiquities has not, however, been considered a ‘front-line’ institution by political groups and is therefore not deemed important by the country’s political elites. On the contrary, it has mostly been attacked and undermined by sectarian political elites who have lobbied to ensure that it remains weak. The SBAH has consequently had limited state funding to rehabilitate degraded and destroyed heritage sites, or to respond effectively to the damage inflicted by decades of war, occupation, armed conflict, agricultural activity and urban expansion. Significantly, even though Iraq has lost hundreds of thousands of cultural objects since the 1990s, there has been insufficient support to prevent or prosecute incidences of looting and smuggling of archaeological materials. Poor funding has also meant that many museums remain closed to visitors and are barely able to maintain the physical condition of their collections. It is impossible to conduct routine inspection and maintenance of the SBAH’s vast estate of heritage sites on the tiny budget available. Not surprisingly, demoralized staff feel over-stretched and under-equipped.
The new political economies of religious endowments
With their privileged positions in society, religious endowments are widely viewed in Iraq as having exploited their custodianship of religious heritage for the benefit of their members, often at a wider public cost. Their actions do not need approval from higher state authorities, yet they have restructured entire cities and heritage sites. For example, the expansion of Shia shrine cities has effectively reshaped the urban fabric, resulting in major cultural and historical losses in such places as Karbala, Khadimiyah, Najaf and Samarra; such developments have also displaced thousands of families.
Resources accrued from ownership or control of cultural and religious assets have – especially in the case of the Shia Endowment – been recycled into profit-making enterprises. In addition to its religious affairs, the Shia Endowment is increasingly transforming itself into a corporation, with interests in property investment, agriculture, trade, factories, and private universities and hospitals. Funds and revenues derived from those investments, as well as from the lucrative Shia pilgrimage trade, accrue to the Shia Endowment rather than to the state.
The expansion of Shia shrine cities has effectively reshaped the urban fabric, resulting in major cultural and historical losses in such places as Karbala, Khadimiyah, Najaf and Samarra.
Cultural property under the endowment’s control is also being folded into an expansive religious tourism network spanning the country. Plans to commercialize cultural heritage in Babil, Baghdad, Samarra and many other provinces and cities are pursued with a view to integrating each region’s cultural heritage into the Shia Endowment’s religious tourism network, effectively undermining prospects for the development of a national tourism strategy or a sustainable post-oil economy.
Religious endowments commonly compete, with each other as well as with national state institutions, to exploit cultural property for the interests of their own political parties and religious groups. The Sunni and Shia Endowments have competed fiercely for possession and/or control of lucrative real estate and mosques in Baghdad and other cities. They regularly pressure the SBAH for the rights to exploit religious and cultural sites or for the transfer of state-owned land. In recent years, this pattern of aggressive extraction of state property has been further evidenced by the capture of cultural heritage assets by the Shia Endowment in Mosul (as indeed across most of Iraq’s provinces).
Resource extraction from cultural property also involves the use of lucrative contracts for the expansion and ‘rehabilitation’ of heritage sites. Political and religious institutions have benefited from these opportunities. Two notable examples involved the Sunni Endowment, which was investigated by Iraq’s court system in 2020 for corruption. In 2016, the Sunni Endowment began a project to rebuild the 1,000-year-old Imam al-Dor Shrine near Tikrit, which had been destroyed by ISIS in 2014. The project was subsequently terminated because of the new structure’s lack of resemblance to the destroyed mausoleum and allegations of corruption. More recently, the endowment has funded work to stabilize the leaning minaret of the Abbasid-era Caliph’s Mosque in central Baghdad; this work involved contractors with limited experience in heritage conservation. In the face of widespread corruption within the religious endowments, and their support by political parties, the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Antiquities has found it difficult to develop a working relationship that can halt destructive interventions, although there have been several successes such as the Imam al-Dor Shrine.
International assistance
The rapid expansion of a network of Shia shrines across the country, particularly in Karbala, Khadimiyah, Najaf and Samarra, has been supported by funding from Iran. While Iran’s assistance to Iraq’s Shia shrines and mosques draws on religious and historical ties that go back to the Safavid period in the 1500s, the nature of this current support is closely oriented to the expansion of Iranian interests in the country and the wider Middle East. The intention of such actions is to bind Iraq closer to Iran, primarily through religion and the integration of the two countries’ political economies. In pursuing this project, Iran has often worked directly with the Shia Endowment, bypassing central Iraqi state institutions. The resulting heritage ‘landscape’ is characterized by an increasingly complex infrastructure of Shia Endowment- and Iran-supported religious and commercial projects.
In recent years, Iraqi cultural heritage preservation has also received major funding from US and European donors, as well as from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and many other countries. These latter interventions have been a response to changing power dynamics within Iraq itself, and represent an extension of regional and international politics in the country. For example, in 2018, the UAE donated $50.4 million to UNESCO, one of the largest gifts to that organization, for the rebuilding of Mosul’s al-Nuri Grand Mosque and al-Hadba Minaret. Funding for the rehabilitation of two churches was also included in the grant. However, the project proved to be fraught with problems. The UNESCO-led international competition for the contract to reconstruct the mosque complex was widely criticized in Iraq for implanting designs alien to the country, for ignoring Mosul’s own rich architectural history, and for not adequately involving Iraqi expertise and professional institutions such as the Union of Engineers, a body with more than 200,000 members. The EU has also provided $22 million to UNESCO’s rebuilding of heritage sites in Mosul, along with some historic houses in Basrah.
In sum, the UNESCO-led $100 million ‘Revive the Spirit of Mosul’ initiative could have provided an unprecedented opportunity for Iraqi architects, designers and urban planners to lead community-informed projects to restore cultural heritage. Yet the initiative’s activities are being mostly delivered as contractor-led enterprises, producing windfalls for European consultants and operators. Such an approach, which is characteristic of most US and European cultural organizations, has conferred limited opportunities for Iraq to develop its own capacity to protect, conserve and rebuild cultural heritage. On the contrary, Iraq’s SBAH and other institutions have merely been viewed as a facilitator rather than a partner whose needs are often overlooked or ignored. A clear case of this is how international organizations have, for the past 20 or more years, ignored SBAH’s own conservation unit and capacity needs. The SBAH will be an important institution if Iraq is to move beyond parachuted-in support from US and European organizations.
Heritage-related aid modalities are closely intertwined with donors’ own interests in Iraq and the Middle East. This has created a situation in which each funder country is associated with a particular form of culture in Iraq, commonly with a view to promoting its own religious or cultural interests in the country. Such funding and the resulting activities, while at times providing valuable support for emergency-related heritage projects and conservation, have often not focused on people, communities or sustainable engagements. This situation has led to fierce competition between US and European cultural institutions for securing contracts and managing and controlling Iraq’s cultural heritage.
After ISIS’s destruction of cultural heritage between 2014 and 2017, funding from international donors increased significantly in certain areas of Iraq. For example, the US government allocated $373 million to Nineveh’s Christian groups, contracting numerous US-based organizations and universities to document and work on rehabilitation projects in Old Mosul and the wider region. While US government initiatives are seemingly designed to support Christian groups, the wider political objectives of such funding are geared to addressing the post-war power vacuum left by the annihilation of minority groups; such groups have commonly been seen by the US as a providing a geostrategic ‘buffer’ against other interests in the region, not least Iran.
In recent years, Saudi Arabia–Iraq relations have also improved, with strengthening cultural relations playing a key role. Saudi Arabia has signed initial agreements to fund a $1 billion sports stadium in Iraq. There are also ongoing discussions over potential Saudi support for the protection and celebration of Abbasid-era and modern cultural heritage (especially in historic Baghdad), sorely neglected since 2003. This proposed intervention, like the UAE’s funding for the reconstruction of the al-Nuri Grand Mosque, is tied to Sunni–Shia competition in the Middle East, with the Gulf states increasingly anxious about the growth of Shia Islam as a political force in the region.
The US is one of the largest external funders of cultural heritage, in part using its Strategic Framework Agreement (SFA) to fund US-based organizations’ activities in Iraq. The US government views cultural diplomacy and heritage interventions as a key component of its work in the country. In practice, however, the SFA has enabled the US to support projects directly, without necessarily forging genuine partnerships with central state institutions or developing long-term Iraqi capacity. Such arrangements need to be reconsidered to ensure that Iraq’s own needs are prioritized, which is not always the case. Activities related to the post-ISIS recovery of Nimrod in Nineveh, for example, have been characterized by inefficiency, a lack of vision and strategy, and interests that do not primarily concern the devastated site. Indeed, several years on from 2017, thousands if not hundreds of fragments of destroyed Assyrian-era cultural monuments in Nimrod have remained on the ground, suffering from the effects of rain and harsh summers.
In a context of state fragmentation and underfunding, international financing has, however, offered an essential resource. For example, the International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage in Conflict Areas (ALIPH) has supported numerous projects in Nineveh and other parts of Iraq to safeguard and celebrate Iraq’s cultural heritage. Such mechanisms have funded work on icons such as the Arch of Ctesiphon (Taq Kisra), part of a sixth-century CE Sassanian palace complex. Other examples have to do with such things as the devastation that might unfold on communities as a result of the construction of the Makhoul Dam, which will affect Kirkuk and Salaheddin provinces. The dam, if completed, will flood 40 villages and hundreds of Assyrian-era sites, including Ashur, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Current and future international support in relation to cultural and archaeological sites will be essential in terms of the safeguarding and documentation of some of Iraq’s most important cultural heritage. In light of unaddressed issues associated with the nature of Iraq’s political challenges, it is likely that – regardless of the above-mentioned limitations and risks – international funding will continue to offer a significant support mechanism for the protection and rehabilitation of cultural property.
