OVER the years, I’ve almost lost count of the priceless treasures of art and antiquity which I’ve seen with my own eyes — and which now lie in pieces. Fourteen years ago, racing across Mosul to see the building where US forces had just shot dead the sons of Saddam Hussein, I glimpsed the “hunchback” minaret of the 12th century al-Nuri mosque looming over the old city, built by Nur al-Din Mahmoud Zangi, an Arab hero who united the Arabs against the Crusaders. Gone, my lords and ladies, in just a few seconds, scarcely a week ago. We blamed the militant Islamic State group and it blamed a US air strike.
Back in 2012, I ran past the 12th century minaret of the Umayyad mosque in Aleppo, pounding down the road towards the ancient Citadel as bullets buzzed up the streets. Within a year, the minaret was dust. We blamed the Syrian government for shelling it. The Syrians blamed al-Nusrah/Al Qaeda “terrorists”. All over Aleppo, they felt the ground tremble as the minaret fell.
Many times in the 1980s I walked through the Roman ruins of Palmyra, visited the Temple of Bel, gazed at the triumphal arch and walked on the theatre stage. When I returned in 2016 after the Syrian army had driven IS from the ancient city, the arch had been destroyed with explosives and the temple was reduced to shards of stone, most of them only two or three inches in length. The theatre was undamaged though I noticed the end of a noose looped around a Roman column. This was IS’s place of execution. Then IS returned and recaptured Palmyra and this time they blew up the very centre of the theatre.
After the war broke out in Bosnia, I walked across the shining stones of Sinan’s 16th Ottoman bridge at Mostar. Within months, that which had stood for 427 years collapsed into the Neretva river under a salvo of Croatian artillery shells. It was exactly 3:27pm on Nov 9, 1993. I know the time because I still have the videotape of the destruction.
I used to freeze-frame the tape and press the rewind button and rebuild the bridge, the spray falling back into the river, the old Turkish stones rising mystically upwards to recompose themselves in their magical span above the river. Its loss was mourned by the Bosnian Muslims — whose ancient mosques were crumbling under Serb gunfire — as the absence of the Mosul minaret is mourned by Iraqis.
The Yugoslav novelist Ivo Andric, in The Bridge on the Drina — surely one of the greatest European novels ever written — describes how “men learned from the angels of God how to build bridges, and therefore, after fountains, the greatest blessing is to build a bridge and the greatest sin to interfere with it...” But we are used to “the greatest sin”. “Culturecide” — the destruction of libraries, graveyards, cathedrals, mosques — became a feature of the Bosnian war. In Kosovo in 1999, the Christian Serbs destroyed ancient mosques. Then the Kosovar Muslims destroyed most of the Serb churches in the province. I saw many of them, before and after their immolation.