The head of the United Nations’ cultural agency has demanded an emergency meeting of the world body’s Security Council following the mass destruction by jihadists of ancient artefacts in Iraq.

The Islamic State jihadist group on Thursdday released a video in which its militants are seen smashing ancient statues to pieces with sledgehammers in the main museum in Mosul, their biggest hub and Iraq’s second city.

Archaeologists and heritage experts have described the destruction as a catastrophe and compared the 2001 dynamiting by the Taliban of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan.