Shia zealots try to cancel a statue of Baghdad’s founder

THEY WERE inspired by activists in America and Britain who toppled statues of Confederate soldiers and 18th-century slave-traders. Their target was 1,000 years older, however. Shia radicals in Iraq want to tear down a bust of Abu Jaafar al-Mansur, which sits on a pedestal in Baghdad (pictured). Mansur, the second Abbasid caliph, who ruled from 754 to 775AD, created a vast empire and founded Baghdad itself, which he called the “City of Peace”. For a while it was the greatest city in the world.