Art Professor: Artifacts Destroyed by ISIS 'Heritage Terror'

Videos of Islamic State fundamentalists vandalizing old artifacts at Iraq's Mosul Museum are "propaganda videos" that translate into "heritage terror," said an Islamic art professor to rt.

The videos showed men holding sledgehammers and knocking at statues, breaking up antiquities and burning ancient writing. However, is the vandalism really authentic? After all, the IS wouldn't pass up a chance to lose money, and these artifacts could fetch them a lot of funds on the black market.

Dr. Stephennie Mulder, an associate professor of Islamic Art at the University of Texas at Austin, said the destruction of the artifacts in Iraq and Syria looked more like propaganda than real destruction.

"This is a propaganda video that is intended as an act of heritage terror. [ISIS] know this kind of action will cause alarm in the international community," said Mulder. "It demonstrates their mastery over everything. Their mastery over the past and it has a deep impact on the people of Iraq as well who cherish these objects."

Two weeks after the sacking of the 300 year-old Mosul Museum researchers launched Project MOSUL to restore damaged artefacts and make them accessible from virtual museums, according to phys.org

Mulder had been a Syrian archaeologist for 10 years before she joined the faculty at the University of Texas, Austin. The robbing and destruction of antiquities was called a defacing of the history of humanity, while Mesopotamia is described by many as the cradle of civilization.

"The place where the first cities began, the first alphabet," Mulder told RT. "Syria and Iraq is where the earliest synagogue, the earliest image of Christ, the largest collections of mosaics [are found]. I could go through time to the medieval Islamic period."

She said that there were six World Heritage sites in Syria, of which five have been badly damaged. She said that the statues may not be completely real, and the metal rods seen in the videos may not mean anything.

"We know that there were about 60 different objects in the two galleries that were pictured in the video. Of those, six or seven were plaster replicas," said Mulder. "The question of the metal rods that has been raised is pretty simple to answer. Anyone who has done archeology conservation knows that ancient statuary is often held together using those metal rods."

Apart from ISIS, even soldiers from Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime were caught on film looting objects from Daraa in southern Syria. There seemed to be enough evidence early in the war that some Free Syrian Army fighters were looting from archaeological sites for profit, yet they have tried to join the international community to preserve the sites.

"No one is free of guilt," she said. "Though ISIS is getting a lot of attention, they are far from being the only actors here."