Iraqi archaeologist quits after threats

Bill Bowder

THE former chairman of the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage in Iraq, Dr Donny George, has been forced to abandon his job and flee the country because of religious persecution, Iraq experts said last week. Dr George, an Assyrian Christian, was concerned about the looting of Iraq’s archaeological sites, and had set up a security force to guard them. Since his departure, international archaeologists have been concerned about the preservation of Iraqi antiquities. Reports warn that indiscriminate digging has left some of the country’s 100,000 archaelogical sites pockmarked "like the moon". A letter to the Iraqi government, signed by 14 experts, including Professor Harriet Crawford, who chairs the British School of Archaeology in Iraq (BSAI), protested that too many treasures had been lost already. Antiquarians should be "above politics", its authors said (...) Dr Eleanor Robson, an expert in Iraqi antiquities, said Sadarists (followers of the extreme Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr) now ran the Ministry of Culture, and had no interest in pre-Islamic heritage. Instead of preserving all of Iraq’s heritage, the Ministry of Culture was prioritising the restoration of Shia shrines...

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