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ISIS Jihadists Destroy 3,000-Year-Old Statues Inside A Museum In Iraq

by Sean Levinson

The Islamic State has obliterated a series of artifacts dating back thousands of years at a museum in Mosul, Iraq.

According to Daily Mail, militants took sledgehammers and drills to the statues and sculptures at the Ninevah Museum because they were worshipped in place of Allah.

Some of the works of art were 2,000 to 3,000 years old.

Among the wreckage is a 7th-Century statue of a winged bull, which represents a protective diety of the Assyrian empire, the New York Post reports.

The terrorist group uploaded a five-minute video of the destruction to a Twitter account earlier today.

A man in the video says,

Our prophet ordered us to remove all these statues as his followers did when they conquered nations.

Several religious monuments have been destroyed by the Islamic State because they were also viewed as heresy, even if they were holy sites for a sect of Islam.

The group is also believed to have sold many artifacts on the black market.

Today's video comes one day after the group was reported to have blown up the Mosul Public Library, which contained approximately 10,000 books and over 700 ancient manuscripts, including some from the Ottoman Empire.

Mosul's Ninevah province is home to almost 1,800 registered archaeological sites, according to the Post.

One of them is Hatra, which is a collection of buildings erected in the 3rd or 2nd century BC.

Citations: ISIS thugs take a hammer to civilisation (Daily Mail), ISIS ransacks museum, destroys 2,000-year-old artifacts (The New York Post)