War on Heritage: Cultural Sites Caught in the Crossfire of West Asia War

Amidst the ongoing West Asia conflict, the US dropped a 900 kg bunker buster bomb on Iran’s Isfahan, claiming that the site harboured ammunition. The bomb led to a series of secondary explosions and shockwaves across the area.

This was not the first strike on the area but part of a series of strikes with which the US and Israel aimed to dismantle the ammunition depot and key defence facilities.

In the backdrop of intensification of this conflict, UNESCO has confirmed that it has verified damage to the Qajar-era Golestan Palace in Tehran as well as the 17th century Chehel Sotoun palace and the Masjed-e Jāme, the country’s oldest Friday mosque, both in Isfahan.

However, this is not the first time that places of rich heritage and cultural significance have been lost to war and have only remained in community memory.

Iran’s Architectural Marvels Under Threat

The Chehel Sotoun palace destroyed in Isfahan is marked as one of the most celebrated architectural marvels of the Safavid era. UNESCO described the Masjed-e Jāme as “a stunning illustration of the evolution of mosque architecture over twelve centuries”. It is the oldest preserved edifice of its type in Iran and a prototype for later mosque designs throughout Central Asia.

The Safavid capital of Isfahan is itself no ordinary city, and not too foreign for India. Its design has served as the primary model of Persian architecture and urban planning. Founded in 1591, “Isfahan-i-nou”, the new Isfahan or the city of Hyderabad in India was designed to mimic the urban grandeur of Isfahan.

The grid layout and the centres, known as Isfahan’s Naqsh-e Jahan Square, inspired the central plaza of Charminar. The destruction of Isfahan brings back the history of destruction of significant cultural and historical cities to war and conflict. From Aleppo to Warsaw, the wars in history have also been a war on history.

Historical Precedents of Cultural Destruction

Cultural sites have long suffered in times of conflict, sometimes deliberately targeted to erase identity and memory. A tragic example is the historic university library in Leuven, Belgium, which was destroyed not once but twice during the World Wars. In the First World War, German forces set fire to the town, and hundreds of thousands of books burned alongside the 17th-century building though many of its oldest documents had been safely moved beforehand. The library was later rebuilt in grand Flemish style, only to be destroyed again with its collections during the German invasion of Leuven in 1940.

In the Bosnian War of the early 1990s, the Ferhadija Mosque in Banja Luka was among hundreds of historic mosques deliberately destroyed by Serb and Croat forces. Such targeted attacks on cultural monuments of different ethnic groups frequently accompanied violence against the people themselves. In later international war crimes trials, patterns of heritage destruction served as important evidence. When the Taliban destroyed two giant Buddhas in remote Bamiyan, Afghanistan, the act went beyond iconoclasm. It formed part of a broader campaign of ethnic cleansing against the local Hazaras, for whom the statues held deep symbolic meaning as emblems of their region. The niches where the Buddhas once stood have since been stabilized, yet debates continue over whether and how they should be rebuilt.

What the Laws Say

In response to the escalating damage, UNESCO has shared the coordinates of all World Heritage sites with the parties involved, urging them to prevent further destruction. International law clearly prohibits attacks on cultural sites and heritage. The 1954 Hague Convention adopted after the widespread devastation of World War II requires warring nations to refrain from targeting monuments, museums, and archaeological sites unless there is imperative military necessity. The United States, Israel, and Iran are all parties to the Convention. It provides mechanisms such as the appointment of a commissioner-general for cultural property to address violations and support investigations when needed.

The cultural treasures inherited from our ancestors bind us to our past: they show where we’ve come from and should, in theory, be preserved for future generations as our greatest cultural wealth. UNESCO’s former Director-General Irina Bokova said, Heritage, before being a building, is a consciousness and a responsibility. When violent extremism attacks culture and cultural diversity, it is also necessary to respond with culture, education, knowledge, to explain the meaning of sites and share the message of tolerance, openness and humanity that heritage carries. Our heritage is our humanity: it defines our place in the world, and helps us to respect and understand one another.