Mehrnoush Soroush said she has been unable to function since the United States and Israel began bombing her home country.
"These are the times that I would otherwise be doing writing and research, and I'm not able to focus, and nobody else is able to focus," she said.
Soroush is an assistant professor of landscape archaeology at the University of Chicago.
She said she her colleagues created a website to document the destruction in Iran. Eventually, people started to ask her if she was going to write a statement about the noticeable silence from the United Nations (UN) and the Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), a specialized agency of the UN.
"I am not really into statements because statements are really ineffective, generally," she said. "But I realized maybe the statement could be also about why these organizations are so ineffective and the absence and silence of both governmental organizations who are supposed to be doing their jobs."
Soroush said the statement is an "outcry of what is wrong in the world." It largely focuses on the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict. The agreement said “damage to cultural property belonging to any people whatsoever means damage to the cultural heritage of all mankind."
She said the letter now has more than 380 signatures from scholars across the world since it was penned last week.
It is heavily directed toward the U.S. media.
"We are saying that the U.S. is violating its obligation, its legal obligation under the 1954 Hague Convention, to which the U.S. is a signatory," she said. "We doubt that the U.S. government is caring about that, but we want the the U.S. media and public opinion to realize that and put pressure on the government."
Soroush said the group also wants UNESCO and the UN to openly condemn the U.S. and Israel's "damage to Iran's cultural heritage."
"We hope they actually come out really strong and condemn and support Iran's legal action because Iran has been filing reports against these violations," she said. "They cannot undermine the destruction, so they have to at least come out and speak openly and condemn it, such that the legal procedures can be pursued strongly."
