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No one is assigned to guard the sprawling site, much less catalogue the fragments of ancient reliefs, chunks of cuneiform texts, pieces of statues and other rubble after ISIL blew up nearly every structure there. Toppled stone slabs bearing a relief from the palace wall that the AP saw on one visit were gone when journalists returned.

“When I heard about Nimrud, my heart wept before my eyes did,” said Hiba Hazim Hamad, an archaeology professor in Mosul who often took her students there. “My family and neighbours came to my house to pay condolences.”

Perhaps the only vigilant guardian left for the ruins is an Iraqi archaeologist, Layla Salih. She has visited it multiple times in recent weeks, photographing the destruction to document it and badgering nearby militias to take care of it. Walking with the AP across the broad dirt expanse of the ruin, she was calm, methodical and precise as she pointed out things she’d seen on previous visits that were no longer in place.

Still, Salih does not despair. She searches out reasons for optimism.

“The good thing is the rubble is still in situ,” she said. “The site is restorable.”

To an untrained eye, that’s hard to imagine, seeing the extent of the destruction that ISIL wreaked in March 2015. Salih estimated that 60 per cent of the site was irrecoverable.

The site’s various structures — several palaces and temples — are spread over 360 hectares on a dirt plateau. A 140-foot-high ziggurat, or step pyramid, once arrested the gaze of anyone entering Nimrud. Where it stood, there is now only lumpy earth. Just past it, in the palace of King Ashurnasirpal II, walls are toppled, bricks spilled into giant piles. The palace’s great courtyard is a field of cratered earth. Chunks of cuneiform writing are jammed in the dirt. Reliefs that once displayed gods and mythical creatures are reduced to random chunks showing a hand or a few feathers of a genie’s wing.