The Iraqi military says its forces have retaken Nimrud, the site of an ancient Assyrian city overrun by Islamic State militants two years ago.
The commander of the Mosul operation, Lt Gen Abdul-Amir Raheed Yar Allah, said troops retook the town after heavy fighting and released a statement saying that “the 9th division of the Iraqi army has liberated the town of Nimrud completely and raised the Iraqi flag over its buildings after the enemy suffered heavy casualties”.
Nimrud lies less than a mile west of the ruins of the 3,000-year-old city. It was not immediately clear if Iraqi forces had retaken the archaeological site.
The soldiers also captured the village of Numaniya, on the edge of the city that was once the capital of an Assyrian empire stretching from Egypt to parts of modern-day Iran and Turkey.
Nimrud was bulldozed last year as part of Islamic State’s campaign to destroy symbols the Sunni Muslim zealots consider idolatrous, says the Iraqi government. Activists, officials and historians condemned Isis at the time for the destruction of the ancient Assyrian archaeological site, while Unesco described the act as a war crime.
Video footage released by Isis, purportedly from Nimrud, also showed its fighters destroying relics with electric drills and explosives.
Nimrud lies on the eastern bank of the Tigris river, about 20 miles south of Mosul, where Iraqi soldiers and special forces are battling Islamic State for control of the largest city under the jihadis’ control in Iraq and neighbouring Syria.
Nimrud was first excavated in the 1840s by the British explorer Austen Henry Layard, who unearthed the winged bull gatekeeper statues later sent to the British Museum. The site also contains the palace of Ashurnasirpal, the king of Assyria.
Many of the site’s relics are in the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and other reliefs, wall paintings, clay tablets and ivory furniture recovered in the 1950s and 60s are in Iraq’s national museum in Baghdad.
Speaking to the Guardian last year following the destruction of the ancient site, historian Tom Holland said the act was “a crime against Assyria, against Iraq, and against humanity. Destroy the past, and you control the future. The Nazis knew this, and the Khmer Rouge – and the Islamic State clearly understand it too.”
David Vergili, a member of the European Syriac Union, said Isis had done “tremendous damage to the social fabric of the Middle East”.
He added: “Preserving cultural and historical heritage in Iraq and elsewhere should be a concern for the whole civilised world as the birthplace and epicentre of our civilisation.”
