What I find so absolutely maddening, in addition to the grief I feel like a physical presence, a cold magnetic fluid running through my blood, in addition to the tears I have shed today and the cries that pained my chest is that I was so close... Maybe only twenty kilometers away, and I never saw it . I never went, we drove on the highway from Erbil to Mosul, took the detour road that everyone took already in 2013 who could possibly avoid having to enter the city of Mosul because Al Qaida was in there, our taxi driver let out a long breath of relief, the guys from Baghdad on the backseat stretched and eased their tension and the whole car breathed an audible sigh once we were past Mosul and nothing had happened except having to show our IDs to the peshmerga for the umpteenth time during this trip from Sulaymaniyeh to Duhok. Iraqi Kurdistan.
I never saw Nimrud, and I never will. Nimrud is gone. Demolished by those very fighters and their friends who very keeping everyone out of Mosul in 2013.
Goodbye, world heritage, treasure of 3000 years. My heart is broken.
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