国际英语新闻:Iraqi Fighters Drive Islamic State Out of Key Town

The Pentagon says Iraqi forces have driven Islamic State out of the western town of al-Baghdadi -- close to a military base where U.S. forces are training Iraqis.

The Combined Joint Task Force said Friday Iraqi forces and tribal fighters from the Anbar region successfully cleared the town of Islamic State, retaking the police station and three bridges across the Euphrates River.

The militants have held the bridges since September.

The task force said the U.S.-led coalition delivered "precise and effective" airstrikes on Islamic State targets in support of the Iraqis.

Iraqi security forces killed a number of Islamic Stade militants wearing suicide vests who tried to attack the U.S. base near al-Baghdadi last month.

Devastation in Nimrud

Islamic State militants are demolishing the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud in northern Iraq, a Tigris River archeological site whose destruction is part of a continuing campaign that "constitutes a war crime," the head of the United Nations’ cultural arm said Friday.

According to Iraqi officials and local residents, the militants moved in on the 3,000-year-old site shortly after noon prayers Thursday with heavy military vehicles, looting artifacts and bulldozing what they couldn’t plunder or tolerate.

"Then they proceeded to level the site to the ground," a tribesman told Reuters news agency. "There used to be statues and walls as well as a castle that [the] Islamic State has destroyed completely."

An Iraqi official acknowledged the extent of destruction is not yet known.

But the militants "defy the will of the world and the feelings of humanity" with their continuing vandalism, Iraq’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said in a statement issued Friday.

"Leaving these gangs without punishment will encourage them to eliminate human civilization entirely, especially the Mesopotamian civilization, which cannot be compensated," the ministry’s statement said.

The ministry has asked the U.N. Security Council for help.

'Nothing is safe'

UNESCO Director General Irina Bokova on Friday decried the assault as "yet another attack against the Iraqi people, reminding us that nothing is safe from the cultural cleansing underway in the country….

"We cannot remain silent. The deliberate destruction of cultural heritage constitutes a war crime," she said, appealing to the "entire international community" to "put an end to this catastrophe." 

Mechtild Rossler, deputy director of UNESCO's World Heritage Center in Paris, told VOA the agency fears at least three royal tombs at the Nimrud site may have been affected.

Nimrud is not on the World Heritage list, but Rossler said the city definitely has "a potential outstanding universal value." (A digital reconstruction of its Northwest Palace, for example, appears in a Metropolitan Museum of Art video.)

"Nimrud has been mentioned in sacred texts all over the world," including the Quran and Bible, "so it's a total misunderstanding that this is an object to be destroyed," Rossler continued. "... These people, they are destroying their own history and their own identity."

The attack is part of the militants’ continuing campaign to terrorize and financially profit, while erasing signs of pre-Islamic or non-Muslim history in swaths of Iraq and Syria under its control. The area includes the so-called cradle of civilization, spawning a mosaic of religions and ethnic groups. The group considers anything outside its narrow brand of Islam to be idolatrous or unworthy.