Preservation or Plunder?

On April 4, 2018, the New York Times published a gripping account of life in northern Iraq between 2014 and 2017 under the so-called Islamic State (also known as ISIS or IS). The article, titled “The ISIS Files: When Terrorists Run City Hall,” was the culmination of over a year of work by correspondent Rukmini Callimachi and a team of reporters, fact-checkers, and translators. In her article, Callimachi framed her project as a competition with Iraqi intelligence agents, who were also on the hunt for ISIS documents. Iraqi officials, she implied, are more interested in combing the files for the names of people affiliated with ISIS than in trying to understand the details of how ISIS administered its territory. By contrast, the NYT, in a sidebar to the article, promised that it is “working to make the trove of ISIS documents publicly available to researchers, scholars, Iraqi officials and anyone else looking to better understand the Islamic State.”

Yet despite this promise of transparency, many Iraqis responded to the publication of “The ISIS Files” with critical questions, frustration, and even fury. This outpouring of anger has dismayed Callimachi, members of her team, and her defenders. Nevertheless, the outcry should not have come as a surprise. The removal of the ISIS files from Iraq is only the latest episode in a long history of seizures of Iraqi archives and artifacts by Europeans and Americans. Rather than dismiss Iraqi critics as unreasonable, everyone with a stake in the study of Iraq—including all journalists, historians, and archivists—must reckon with the enduring legacies of two centuries of Western removal of Iraqi heritage.