After being looted and vandalized, the museum offers a first exhibition, in partnership with the Louvre Museum, before a total reopening in 2026.
It is a first for 20 years and the American invasion, the museum of Mosul reopens its doors. Since Friday, May 12, a temporary exhibition, in partnership with the Louvre Museum, looks back on the history of the Mosul museum, its destruction by Daesh and its rehabilitation. This multimillenary heritage that we thought disappeared for eternity is therefore reborn.
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The Mosul museum was ransacked, looted, vandalized and the Assyrian hall dynamited. It is still under construction and remains largely inaccessible. It will officially reopen in 2026. The final phase of its rehabilitation was launched in early May by an international consortium funded by the Swiss Aliph Foundation.
This opening of the doors until June 1 is a key step. The most impressive part of this restoration are the five Assyrian works. There are over 10,000 pieces to pick up. The Louvre teams take care of this and train Iraqis on the spot. “We focused on the masterpieces, so the famous lion of Nimrud, the base of the throne…Base of the throne which is at the origin of the explosion of the Assyrian room which many have seen in particular in the media and then the banquet stele which is an absolutely emblematic work”explains Ariane Thomas, director of the Department of Oriental Antiquities at the Parisian museum.
In 2003, 15,000 pieces from the museum were looted
Everything will not be put in its place. Some works have been looted and have disappeared. An auto-da-fé reduced the museum’s 28,000 books to ashes. The disappearance of heritage in Iraq is therefore a real problem, but the country is determined to find it, in partnership with the international community, Interpol and Unesco.
Nearly 15,000 pieces were looted from the Baghdad museum in 2003 while the international coalition took over the Iraqi capital. The looting continued directly on the sites, because the soil of Iraq is rich in archaeological heritage. It is a difficult phenomenon to stop according to Dr. Laith Hussein, director of the National Board of Antiquities and National Heritage of Iraq.
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“We are doing our best to protect our sites, because there are more than 15,000 archaeological sites in Iraq. We expect this number to double. How can you protect these sites? It is an impossible mission. It need an army, he believes. Last week alone, 6,000 pieces that were loaned out a century ago were returned by the British Museum. Since 2019, Iraq claims to have recovered no less than 34,000 artifacts, most of which were on the black market.