to museums, in Mosul, Baghdad, Paris, London and elsewhere but giant “lamassu” statues — winged bulls with human heads — and reliefs were still on site.
The destruction at Nimrud came a week after the Jihadist group released a video showing militants armed with sledgehammers and jackhammers smashing priceless ancient artefacts at the Mosul museum.
That attack sparked widespread consternation and alarm, with some archaeologists and heritage experts comparing it with the 2001 demolition of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan by the Taliban.
Unesco director general Irina Bokova demanded an emergency meeting of the Security Council and called for the International Criminal Court to look into the Mosul museum destruction.
In the Jihadists’ extreme interpretation of Islam, statues, idols and shrines amount to recognising objects of worship other than God and must be destroyed.
The video released by IS last week showed militants knocking statues off their plinths and rampaging through the Mosul museum’s collection.
It also shows Jihadists using a jackhammer to deface an imposing granite Assyrian winged bull at the Nergal Gate in Mosul.
“These artefacts behind me are idols for people from ancient times who worshipped them instead of God,” a bearded militant said in the video.
Many of the artefacts destroyed in the Mosul museum were from Nimrud and Hatra.
IS spearheaded a sweeping offensive last June that overran Nineveh province, where Mosul and Nimrud are located, and swept through much of Iraq’s Arab heartland.
The Mosul region was home to a mosaic of minorities, including Assyrian Christians, who consider themselves to be the region’s indigenous people.
IS militants have systematically destroyed heritage sites in areas they control, including Muslim shrines that they also consider heretical, and they have repeatedly attacked members of religious minorities.
Iraqi security forces and allied fighters are battling to regain ground from the Jihadists with backing from an international anti-IS coalition as well as neighbouring Iran.
They are currently engaged in their biggest operation yet, to retake the city of Tikrit, about 100 kilometres north of Baghdad.
But major operations to drive IS out of Nineveh are likely months away, leaving the province’s irreplaceable historical sites at the mercy of militants who have no regard for Iraq’s past.
The national museum in Baghdad officially reopened last month after 12 years of painstaking efforts to recover nearly a third of the 15,000 pieces looted during the US-led invasion.