New satellite photos confirm what church leaders and Middle East preservationists had feared: the oldest Christian monastery in Iraq has been reduced to rubble, yet another victim of Islamic State’s relentless destruction of heritage sites it considers heretical.
St Elijah’s monastery stood as a place of worship for 1,400 years, including most recently for US troops. In earlier millennia, generations of monks tucked candles in the niches, prayed in the chapel and worshipped at the altar. The Greek letterschi and rho, representing the first two letters of Christ’s name, were carved near the entrance.
This month, a high resolution camera was used to capture images of the site, which were compared with earlier photographs of the same spot. Before it was razed, a partially restored, 27,000-sqft stone and mortar building stood fortress-like on a hill above Mosul. Although the roof was largely missing, it had 26 distinctive rooms including a sanctuary and chapel. A month later photos show “the stone walls have been literally pulverised”, said imagery analyst Stephen Wood, chief executive of Allsource Analysis, who pinpointed the destruction between August and September 2014.
“Bulldozers, heavy equipment, sledgehammers, possibly explosives turned those stone walls into this field of grey-white dust. They destroyed it completely,” he said.
In Irbil, Iraq, Catholic priest Father Paul Thabit Habib, 39, was shocked by the images. “Our Christian history in Mosul is being barbarically levelled,” he said. “We see it as an attempt to expel us from Iraq, eliminating and finishing our existence in this land.”
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