Iraqi forces retook the ancient town of Nimrud in recent
days and discovered the true extent of destruction wrought by Isis against its
three-thousand-year-old ruins. With electric drills and sledgehammers, they
smashed up the famous winged bulls carved by the Assyrians so many centuries
ago and bulldozed other parts of this great historical treasure.

Why should we care? Many might ask this question when you
think of hundreds of thousands of people killed or displaced. Surely it’s the
height of bad taste in these circumstances to mourn the loss of archaeological
sites? But that overlooks an important point about Isis. It wrecked Nimrud for
the same reason it plundered Palmyra – to try and wipe out the memory of Iraqi
and Syrian people.

Societies have long sought to protect and preserve their
cultural heritage, for reasons ranging from education and historical research,
to the desire to reinforce a sense of identity. In times of war and conflict,
cultural identity and cultural heritage become all the more important.
Buildings, monuments and symbols of a culture that speak of shared roots
acquire an increased significance. Accordingly, they can become targets of
violent and oppressive action that seeks to destroy the symbols valued by
enemies or the iconography associated with alternative faiths and traditions.

Isis is a nihilistic movement that believes it has
established a kind of ‘year zero’; nothing that happened before matters and
history only truly begins with Isis. The fact that the first Muslim rulers of
the Middle East and all those who have governed since chose not to level
structures such as these is telling of the terrorists’ mentality.

The great Islamic empires were confident enough in their
ideas and values not to have to carry out wanton acts of vandalism. The past
could be acknowledged while at the same time embracing the revealed truth of
Islam. But Isis does not have this underlying confidence. It knows the clock is
ticking against its ‘so-called caliphate’ and the territory it has illegally
seized from the Iraqi and Syrian people.

So it has to make a mark quickly. In seeking to make its
mark on history, Isis blows up shrines, mosques, churches, temples and ancient
cities. Secretly, it also loots whatever it can sell on the global antiquities
black market to make fast cash. In doing all this, Isis knowingly removes a
part of our historical memory – what it meant to be Iraqi or Syrian. It hopes
that by erasing the achievements of our ancestors, it can reshape our identity.

“Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn people
too.” These words by Heinrich Heine are now engraved on a plaque on the
Bebelplatz in Berlin, where the Nazis stoked their literary bonfire in May
1933. What was done then was horrific and is horrific now. Not because the
books burnt on that day were more important than the millions murdered by the
Nazi regime, but because they were part of the same process of deliberate
destruction and erasure of culture, heritage and people that ran counter to an
extremist group’s version of the world.

Mourning the loss of Nimrud – or Palmyra in Syria and the
Buddhas of Bamiyan, destroyed by Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001 – is not
unsympathetic to the suffering of the people in these places.

But instead, seeing Nimrud so wounded and desecrated, like
the people of Mosul, makes us redouble our determination to see Iraq freed of
these thugs. Every church they have tried to pull down, we will make the bells
ring again. Every mosque they have bulldozed we will rebuild anew. That is the
real future for Iraq.

 The Independent