Daesh has razed a 1,400-year-old Christian monastery using a combination of bulldozers, other heavy equipment and potentially explosives.
Satellite images released on Wednesday by the Associated Press now reveal just a pile of rubble where St Elijah’s Monastery, the oldest in Iraq, used to stand on a hill above Mosul, the stronghold of Daesh in Iraq.
The images show the stone walls “have been literally pulverised”, probably at some point between August and September 2014, according to a report by image analyst Stephen Wood to AP.
“Bulldozers, heavy equipment, sledgehammers, possibly explosives turned those stone walls into this field of gray-white dust. They destroyed it completely,” he said.
The monastery had survived for almost one-and-a-half millenia, and had only suffered superficial damage throughout the country’s most recent conflicts, and was still used for Christian worship.
“Our history in Mosul is being barbarically leveled,” said the Iraq-based Reverend Paul Thabit Habib. “We see it as an attempt to expel us from Iraq, eliminating and finishing our existence in this land.”
The vandalism is the latest in a series of acts of attempted cultural destruction carried out by the intellectually stymied group – the most notable being the destruction of the Syrian ruins of Palmyra.
