 Hi, I am from Iraq, and Iraq was used to be called Mesopotamia in the old days. And Mesopotamia, as you probably know, was the cradle of civilization. It was here where some of the greatest contributions to humanity evolved. Sumeria, for example, invented writing, they invented the wheel, Babylonia, Assyria. And Iraq, in fact, is very fortunate in having been endowed with a tremendous wealth of cultural heritage. And this heritage comes in the form of thousands of archaeological sites. Some of them go back to 10,000 years and hundreds of historic cities and thousands of monuments. All very important, very important not only to Iraq but to all humanity. And in fact, in this context, one would expect that Iraq would be leading the whole world in preserving its heritage, teaching the rest of the world how best to preserve this heritage. And unfortunately, and ironically, Iraq has become a leader in destroying its own heritage. And this is tantamount to my mind to what I call cultural suicide. And I'm beginning, I will, and I think by illustrating some of the slides, illustrating the points I'm going to emphasize. And I think this would be a good lesson for the rest of the world. And I will begin with these series of slides, beginning with walls. And I think, you know, most if not all historic cities were originally walled. And this wall, in fact, protected these cities from any intrusion from the modern expansion that took place in the early 20th century. But unfortunately, the local authorities, the municipalities, began to have the idea of destroying these walls. And in fact, all of them have been demolished since the 1930s. And thereby inviting modern development to intrude to disrupt the very delicate historic fabric of nearly all historic cities. And what happened then immediately, almost, is the introduction of wide streets like that, wide straight, wide vehicular streets through the very delicate historic fabric of this city, for example, Mosul and many other cities as well. So recent surveys indicate that as much as 80% of the historic fabric of most Iraqi cities have been lost forever. And this is really a tragic loss. And another type of loss is what I call the loss of historic context of a monument. So you see most historic mosques, for example, not only mosques but other monuments originally were part and parcel of the local community. They were physically adjacent, physically integrated with hundreds if not thousands of other smaller buildings. And recently, again, local authorities had the idea of removing the immediate surrounding of these monuments, thereby exposing the monument on its own, and thereby, of course, separating the monument from its own context. And I think to my mind this is another great loss, unfortunately. Another type of loss is the sheer physical, ruthless annihilation of a city, a whole city. And we have a very glaring example here, what you see on the left-hand side is the historic citadel city of Karkuk in the north of the country. A citadel that goes back to 2,000 years, and it had almost 900 houses, beautiful houses. I've seen all of them. I photographed a lot of them. And they had brilliant, vital communities in them. And in 1998, by sheer political decision for, maybe I suspect for political reasons, security reasons, almost the whole city has been bulldozed, as you can see by this Google aerial or satellite picture. And this is really a massive annihilation of cultural heritage. Another thing which is very common is the direct demolition of historic monuments, as we can see here on the right-hand side of the picture. A 1,000-year-old monument was demolished purely because to allow for a modern street. Another monument was demolished again to allow for the alignment of another street. And this 1,000-year-old minaret was blown up recently in 2006 by terrorists for ideological reasons. Now, to my mind, these are huge crimes. And I'm proposing that organizations like UNESCO and the United Nations should seriously think of considering such crimes as crimes against humanity. It is only by this international accountability that we can hope to stop any further loss to this tremendous cultural heritage for the whole humanity. Thank you.