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BEIRUT: Declassified 1970s-era US spy satellite imagery has led a British-Iraqi archaeological team to what they believe is the site of a seventh-century battle that became decisive in the spread of Islam throughout the region.
The Battle of Al-Qadisiyah was fought in Mesopotamia — in present-day Iraq — in the A.D. 630s between Arab Muslims and the army of the Sassanid Persian dynasty during a period of Muslim expansion. The Arab army prevailed and continued on its march into Persia, now Iran.
A joint team of archaeologists from the UK’s Durham University and the University of Al-Qadisiyah stumbled across the site while undertaking a remote sensing survey to map the Darb Zubaydah, a pilgrimage route from Iraq’s Kufa to Makkah in ��������Ƶ built more than 1,000 years ago. The findings were published Tuesday in the journal Antiquity.
While mapping the route, the team noticed that a site some 30 kilometers (20 miles) south of Kufa in Iraq’s southern Najaf province — a desert area with scattered plots of agricultural land — had features that closely matched the description of the Al-Qadisiyah battle site described in historic texts.
William Deadman, a specialist in archaeological remote sensing at Durham University, said the Cold War era satellite images are a commonly used tools by archaeologists working in the Middle East, because the older images often show features that have been destroyed or altered and would not show up on present-day satellite images.
“The Middle East has developed so much in the last 50 years, both agricultural expansion and urban expansion,” he said. Some of the distinguishing features at the Al-Qadisiyah site, such as a distinctive trench, were “much more pristine and clear” in the 1970s images, he said.
A survey on the ground confirmed the findings and convinced the team that they had correctly identified the site.
The key features were a deep trench, two fortresses and an ancient river that was reportedly once forded by elephant-mounted Persian troops, said Jaafar Jotheri, a professor of archaeology at the University of Al-Qadisiyah who is part of the team that made the discovery. The survey team also found pottery shards consistent with the time period when the battle took place.
Jotheri said that Iraqis of his generation, who grew up under the rule of Saddam Hussein, were all familiar with the battle in minute detail, down to the names of the generals on both sides.
The battle at the time had political connotations — Iraq was engaged in a devastating war with Iran through much of the 1980s. Saddam pointed to the Battle of Qadisiyah as a harbinger of victory for Iraq.
Like most children growing up in that era, Jotheri said he had watched a popular movie about the battle multiple times as it was on regular rotation on television.
In the post-Saddam era, Al-Qadisiyah has become something of a political litmus test. Iraqis’ views of the battle vary depending on their feelings toward Iran, which has expanded its influence in the country since the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq that toppled Saddam.
“There is some political and religious context in this battle, because now, of course, we have religious differences, ethnic differences, political differences in Iraq and we read or we view everything based on our … differences,” Jotheri said. But he added, ”We all agree that it is a very important battle, a decisive one, and we all know about it.”
The team plans to begin excavations at the site in the coming year, Jotheri said.
The discovery comes as part of a broader project launched in 2015 to document endangered archaeological sites in the region.
It also comes at the time of a resurgence of archaeology in Iraq, a country often referred to as the “cradle of civilization,” but where archaeological exploration has been stunted by decades of conflict that halted excavations and led to the looting of tens of thousands of artifacts.
In recent years, the digs have returned and thousands of stolen artifacts have been repatriated.

ANKARA: Turkiye is considering adopting a unified fiber optic telecoms entity to expand its network, signalling it could create a separate manager for the expensive infrastructure investments, a senior official told Reuters.
The study is at an early stage and all options remain on the table, said the Turkish official, who has direct knowledge of government telecoms policy but requested anonymity.
Such a consolidation of telecoms infrastructure could help accelerate Turkiye’s broadband Internet usage and speed, benefit smaller service providers and pose a challenge for the network’s largest stakeholder, Turk Telekom.
“We are considering the unification of the fiber infrastructure and conducting a study on it,” the senior Turkish official said when asked about some sector demands for infrastructure and sales to be separated, and for the establishment of a common infrastructure holding company.
“It is in early stages and not yet finalized. By establishing a common infrastructure, we aim to further strengthen our country’s fiber-optics network,” the official told Reuters.
For years Ankara has demanded that telecom operators invest more to accelerate fiber network expansion. The companies have grown the network by a bit more than 3 percent per year over the past decade, and have partly blamed complicated permissions and high costs for the slow progress.

NETWORK OWNERSHIP
Turk Telekom owns and maintains 78 percent of Turkiye’s 577,000-kilometer (359,000-mile) national fiber network through a concession agreement that is set to expire in 2026.
A handful of other players, including Turkcell , Turksat and Vodafone own the rest.
Turk Telekom and Turkcell are controlled by the country’s wealth fund.
Smaller service providers have long advocated that investments should be made by a jointly-owned entity, rather than largely by Turk Telekom, which also sells telecom services. An effort in the mid-2010s to set up such an entity failed.
In July, UK-based Vodafone’s Turkiye unit again suggested in a report that the business of selling telecoms services should be separated from infrastructure investment and management, which could be handled by a separate “common” entity.
In September, Turk Telekom’s chief executive rejected the suggestion, saying it was aimed at carving away its infrastructure assets, which are set to return to the government once the concession period ends.
Turkiye trails its peers on fixed-line broadband Internet usage, with 23 subscribers per 100 inhabitants as of last year, below the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average of 36.
It also lags on broadband speed with less than one high-speed subscriber with greater than 100 Mbps speed per 100 people, compared to a 24 OECD average.