Layla Salih

After ISIS occupied the region in 2014, they emptied much of the museum and began a campaign of destruction of the area's pre-Islamic heritage.

Salih and a colleague, Faisal Jaber, investigated and reported on the destruction of Christian sites in the province.

At the time, she was the only antiquities official able to survey the scene, as nearly 50 other Iraqi archaeologists remained trapped in ISIS-controlled Mosul.

Salih estimated that about 60 percent of the site was irredeemable, but she also felt that because a lot of the wreckage remained on location, much could be restored.

Beneath the Nabi Yunus shrine, her team found that ISIS had dug tunnels and broken into a hitherto unknown palace in search of antiquities to plunder and sell.

The king's name does not appear in the inscription, but phrases separately identified with him do, and it describes his reconstruction of Babylon, previously destroyed by Sennacherib, his father.

[9] Salih reported that more than a hundred items of pottery, which were likely taken from the Nabi Yunus tunnels by ISIS, were recovered from a house in Mosul.