BAGHDAD -- Islamic State militants continued their campaign targeting cultural heritage sites in territories they control in northern Iraq, looting and damaging the ancient city of Hatra just one day after bulldozing the historic city of Nimrud, according to Iraqi government officials and local residents.
The destruction in Hatra comes as the militant Islamic group fought pitched battles in eastern Syria in an area populated by predominantly Christian villages.
Iraqi officials in the northern city of Mosul said Saturday that Islamic State militants have begun demolishing Hatra, a move UNESCO described as "cultural cleansing."
An official with the ministry of tourism and antiquities' archaeological division in Mosul said people living near Hatra heard two large explosions Saturday morning, then reported seeing bulldozers demolishing the site. He spoke anonymously for fear of reprisal.
Saeed Mamuzini, a Kurdish official from Mosul, said the militants had begun carrying away artifacts from Hatra as early as Thursday and Saturday began to destroy the 2,000-year-old city.
Hatra, 68 miles southwest of Mosul, was a large fortified city during the Parthian Empire and capital of the first Arab kingdom. A UNESCO world heritage site, Hatra is said to have withstood invasions by the Romans in 116 A.D. and 198 A.D. thanks to its high, thick walls reinforced by towers.
"The destruction of Hatra marks a turning point in the appalling strategy of cultural cleansing underway in Iraq," said Irina Bokova, the director-general of UNESCO, and Abdulaziz Othman Altwaijri, director-general of the Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in a joint statement.
Meanwhile in Syria, Islamic State militants attacked a string of predominantly Christian villages Saturday, touching off heavy clashes with Kurdish militiamen and their local allies, activists said.
The attack began around dawn and targeted at least three villages near the town of Tal Tamr along the Khabur River in Hassakeh province. The Islamic State kidnapped more than 220 Assyrian Christians from the same area last month.
The fighting Saturday was focused in villages on the northern bank of the river as the militants press to capture Tal Tamr, a strategic crossroads some 20 miles from the city of Hassakeh, said Osama Edwards, director of the Assyrian Network for Human Rights.
"The battles are now very intensive, very violent," said Edwards, who is based in Sweden. "Tal Tamr is the main goal of the Islamic State, to give them the corridor to the eastern border to Iraq."
The Islamic State currently controls about a third of Iraq and Syria. The Sunni extremist group has been campaigning to purge ancient relics it says promote idolatry that violates its fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic law. A video it released recently shows extremists smashing artifacts in the Mosul museum, and in January, the group burned hundreds of books from the Mosul library and Mosul University.
The majority of the artifacts destroyed in the Mosul Museum attack were from Hatra.
On Friday, the group looted artifacts from Nimrud, a 3,000-year-old city in Iraq, and bulldozed it in a move United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon declared "a war crime."
Baghdad-based archaeology researcher Junaid Amer Habib said the destruction of the archaeological sites and artifacts could be "a cover-up operation" to disguise efforts to smuggle and sell precious antiquities.
On Saturday, gunmen abducted 31 Shiite men in eastern Baghdad, an attack police described as targeting suspected criminals, Iraqi officials said. Separate attacks in the capital killed six people, authorities said.
The kidnappings happened early Saturday as gunmen stormed houses in the Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City, two police officials said.
Some Shiite militias have been involved in attacks against suspected prostitutes and stores that sell liquor as a part of their campaign to impose Islamic laws.
Meanwhile, police and hospital officials said three mortar shells landed on houses in Baghdad's southern suburb of Arab Jabour, killing four people and wounding nine. A bomb blast near an outdoor market in northern Baghdad also killed two people and wounded seven, they said.
All officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to journalists.
In Libya, Islamic State fighters attacked an oil field and nine foreign workers are unaccounted for, officials said Saturday.
Austrian Foreign Ministry spokesman Martin Weiss said several security personnel were killed in Friday afternoon's attack at the site in al-Ghani, south of Sirte.
Security teams retook the site, but nine foreign workers are unaccounted for, including one Austrian, one Czech and the seven others, who are non-EU citizens, Weiss said.
Information for this article was contributed by Ryan Lucas, Robert Burns, Salar Salim, Sameer N. Yacoub and staff members of The Associated Press.
A Section on 03/08/2015