Stolen Syrian antiquities flood online marketplace after Assad fall

New government is attempting to curtail the looting, which has increased since December

The ruins of the ancient city of Palmyra, a Unesco World Heritage Site in central Syria, has fallen prey to amateur and professional looters. EPA

The illegal trafficking of Syrian antiquities has spiked dramatically since December, according to findings by the Antiquities Trafficking and Heritage Anthropology Research Project (Athar).

“The last three to four months has been the biggest flood of antiquities trafficking I have ever seen, from any country, ever,” Katie Paul, Athar’s co-director, told The Guardian.

Nearly a third of the 1,500 Syrian antiquities trafficking cases documented by the group since 2012 have taken place in the months after former president Bashar Al Assad was toppled. The treasures are being sold online, primarily through Facebook Marketplace.

“When the regime fell, we saw a huge spike on the ground,” Amr al-Azm, co-director of Athar, told The Guardian. “It was a complete breakdown of any constraints that might have existed in the regime periods that controlled looting.”

Syria is still recovering from the blight of Baathist rule. The dismantlement of the regime’s security network, which was a source of terror for citizens, as well as pervasive poverty are the driving forces behind the looting.

Artefacts and statues from the Temple of Baal, destroyed by ISIS in 2015, have been subject to looting. Matt Kynaston / The National

Both professionals and amateurs are involved in the trafficking. Individuals have been digging heritage sites, such as in Palmyra, with metal detectors and shovels. Criminal networks, meanwhile, are making use of heavy machinery to extract entire mosaics and statues from archeological sites.

Facebook currently hosts dozens of groups with members buying and selling metal detectors, posting pictures of pottery, coins, mosaics and manuscripts, and trying to get them appraised. Given Syria’s rich history and the region’s location at the crossroads of empires, the antiquities date back to several civilisations, including Assyrian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek and Roman.

Thwarting the trafficking is a monumental task. The new Syrian government is attempting to curtail looting, proposing financial incentives for returning finds and threatening up to 15 years in prison. However, given the lack of government resources and the fact that 90 per cent of Syrian society is living under the poverty line, the looting is still widespread.

The responsibility to put an end to the trafficking could fall on the West, which is where most of the stolen antiquities are being sold to.

“How do we stop this? Stop the demand in the West,” said al-Azm, who is a professor of Middle East history and anthropology at Shawnee State University in Ohio. “Until the security issue improves, you won’t see an improvement. We focus on the supply side to abrogate the responsibility of the West.”