SURESH BABU

In August 2012, a group of Italian archaeologists discovered six rock reliefs chiseled into the walls of an ancient Assyrian canal near the town of Faida in northern Iraq. Three other reliefs had been discovered by a British archaeologist 40 years earlier, but fighting between Kurds and the Iraqi government had made excavation impossible. Armed conflict prevented work at the site for a second time as ISIS advanced into nearby Mosul in 2014 and the front line lay only 16 miles away.