Threatened city in Iraq put on U.N. heritage list

WELLINGTON, New Zealand — UNESCO designated a city in Iraq where mosques have come under attack as an endangered world cultural treasure Thursday and revised its name for the Auschwitz death camp in Poland to emphasize Nazi Germany's role.

The U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's heritage group also named several new world cultural sites, including the Sydney Opera House, the Iwami Ginzan silver mine in Japan, the Parthian Fortresses of Turkmenistan and the Red Fort in New Delhi built by Mogul emperors.

In inscribing the archaeological remains in the Iraqi city of Samarra on the World Heritage List, UNESCO did not mention the Iraq war but said the site was listed as "in danger."

Insurgents have repeatedly targeted holy sites in Samarra, a city 60 miles north of Baghdad, the Iraqi capital. The Samarra site stretches along the eastern bank of the Tigris River and includes the 9th-century Great Mosque with its 170-foot-tall spiral minaret. The 26-mile-long site "testifies to the architectural and artistic innovations that developed there and spread to the other regions of the Islamic world and beyond," the U.N. committee said.

Auschwitz now will be known as "Auschwitz-Birkenau," with the subtitle "German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp (1940-1945)," said Roni Amelan, a committee spokesman. It had been listed as the "Auschwitz Concentration Camp."

Poland, which was subjected to a brutal Nazi occupation, sought the name change to ensure that people understand it had no role in establishing or running the camp where the Nazis killed more than 1 million people, most of them Jews.

The camp was made a World Heritage Site in 1979.

Other sites added to the list include the Lope-Okanda landscape of Gabon, the Richtersveld mountainous desert of South Africa, the rock carvings of Namibia's Twyfelfontein region and 1,800 fortified tower houses in China's Guangdong province.

Teide National Park on the island of Tenerife and ancient beech forests in central Europe were also designated World Heritage sites, as were the Mehmed Pasa Sokolovic Bridge in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Canada's Rideau Canal and Greece's old town of Corfu.