How Biladi and Blue Shield are helping to preserve the cultural heritage of war-torn countries
Reverend Elia Kamel stands on the rubble of St George Melkite Catholic Church in Dardaghiya, southern Lebanon, damaged during the war in Lebanon in 2024. (Reuters: Aziz Taher)
Joanne Bajjaly lives in a city she describes as "split" by war, where some areas have been targeted by extreme bombing.
The former journalist turned heritage activist lives in Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, which last week faced its 100th day of war between Lebanese militant group and political party Hezbollah and Israel. She is concerned with how war can erase a country's cultural history.
Bajjaly was reporting in Iraq in 2003 when she witnessed the looting of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad during the Iraq War, leading her to found Biladi, a non-governmental organisation that works to protect Lebanon's cultural heritage.
After the two-month war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2024, Biladi started documenting the destruction of traditional villages, up to 700 years old, in southern Lebanon, close to its border with Israel.
"When we went there, it was a deliberate act of destruction, not regular destruction," Bajjaly told ABC Radio National's By Design.
"This is a destruction that aims at uprooting people from their land and their history," she says.
"When you go to these villages, the level of destruction is so high that you can't find the road."
She explains villages are destroyed during wartime in a "very scientific and methodological way", impacting not just roads, but homes, graveyards, mosques, churches, shrines and even the natural environment, making it difficult to find places of cultural significance beneath the rubble.
"This is the technique that is being used so that people cannot find any link to their history," Bajjaly says.
"Forget the passing on of memory from one space, from one person to the other, and one generation to the other."
That destruction is ongoing as war continues in Lebanon today, with eight people killed and more than 30 injured in Israeli strikes on the southern Lebanon city of Tyre last week.
Last week, Israel also attacked the Hezbollah stronghold suburb of Dahiyeh in southern Beirut, killing at least two people and leading Iran to launch missiles at Israel in support of Lebanon. In response, Israel launched air strikes targeting central and western Iran.
The military actions follow the US state department's announcement earlier this month of plans to renew the ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon, "contingent on a complete cessation of Hizbollah fire".
An act of resistance
The work of Biladi is two-pronged. It tries to move collections of antiquities from areas that may be bombed and also works with villages and communities to create an archive of lost cultural heritage.
"Once you know, you cannot un-know," Bajjaly says.
"We want them to know what they have lost as it is part of our history."
That documentation can be painful for families who have lost their homes, which are also historical buildings.
But it can also be the source of pride, she explains.
"Now we know what we have lost in terms of not just me and my memories, but as a general loss for the nation," she says.
It's a way to more precisely assess the level of destruction and share that information with communities and governments as they look to rebuild.
"[We advocate for governments] to include historical buildings as part of the reconstruction plan and remunerate people accordingly in order to push for the preservation of the history," Bajjaly says.
Buildings were reduced to rubble in what was once a market in Nabatieh in southern Lebanon in 2024. (Reuters: Adnan Abidi)
Biladi's archival work can be seen as an "act of resistance to a war that aims at eradicating the history of the place", Bajjaly adds.
"And it's a cultural resistance to any act of cutting the link between people and their history, or a population and their history, and keeping the knowledge and the remembrance alive.
"People need their history. People need to go back to their villages. This is their land. It belongs to them. And they need to work their history in a way that they can preserve it and know the value of their heritage and the attachment to their lands.
"I hope our work will reduce their pain a little bit. Our aim is not to just safeguard heritage. It's also to reduce the suffering of the population a little bit."
Working with the military
Professor Peter Stone is the co-author with Bajjaly of the book The Destruction of Cultural Heritage in Iraq and the president of Blue Shield International, which works to protect cultural and natural heritage from war and natural disasters.
Peter Stone helps militaries realise the importance of protecting cultural heritage sites. (Supplied: Newcastle University)
Stone says it's important to begin preservation work during peacetime, with Blue Shield collaborating with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and others in training armed forces.
"What we try to do is embed ideas about cultural property protection into that training," he says.
"So, they begin to slowly realise that, actually, the protection of heritage could be as important as the logistics for keeping the ammunition going to the frontline troops."
When heritage or religious sites aren't protected, as in the bombing by a group of extremists of the al-Askari Mosque in Samarra, Iraq, in 2006, conflicts such as the Iraq War can escalate, Stone explains. It's something these forces are coming to understand.
The al-Askari Mosque in Samarra was destroyed in a bomb attack in 2006. (ABC News)
But first, he found he needed to start speaking in military terms, talking about "potential force multipliers" (strategies that increase the effectiveness of a military force without increased resources), rather than national institutions and World Heritage Sites.
Now, he says Blue Shield International helps militaries create their no-strike list during times of conflict, adding heritage sites, alongside medical, educational and community facilities.
'First aid' for cultural heritage
When a site of cultural significance is damaged, Blue Shield can also help with "first aid" for the heritage site.
Archaeologist Ania Kotarba, president of Blue Shield Australia and an academic at Adelaide University, teaches museum workers how to stabilise, document and preserve damaged sites as much as possible.
"In conflict, the first stage really is like emergency medicine," she says.
"You assess the scene, you decide what is most at risk, you document, and, as quickly as you can, you stabilise what you can, you salvage vulnerable materials, and you can coordinate with engineers, emergency responders, humanitarian actors, and local custodians.
"Then, you try to build the repository that could later be used for whatever purpose the community chooses. So, it could be reconstructions, it could be rebuilding, it could be creating a three-dimensional hologram or digital twin."
Today, that documentation is made possible with advanced 3D modelling and AI-assisted technologies.
"You can document the site within minutes, very quickly, using a mobile phone, and you can do it even remotely using drone footage," Kotarba says. "And the detail of preservation, this record, is just outstanding."
But that kind of detailed reconstruction is only possible with adequate funds and resources.
"The more detail you want to bring in, the more expensive it will be, the more painstaking the part of that process will be," she says.
Meanwhile, longer-term preservation strategies are the domain of government, Kotarba says, rather than non-governmental organisations such as Blue Shield.
But she stresses rebuilding is possible, pointing to the examples of Korea, Vietnam and Iraq.
"It will happen in Gaza," she says. "It will happen in Ukraine. It will happen in Iran. It would just take time, it would take generations.
"That's the most important thing about loss of heritage: It's immediate.
"It takes one blast, it takes one shock wave, it takes one ricochet to destroy the site that has been standing for hundreds or thousands of years.
"It takes decades to rebuild, if ever. And that community fabric around the site remains broken."