It was learned on Wednesday that while on an undercover assignment for the Guardian, Mark Altaweel, a Near East specialist from the UCL Institute of Archaeology, had discovered looted artifacts from Syria and Iraq being sold in antique shops in London.
Altaweel said the artifacts, considered “conflict antiquities,” he found in some shops included pieces of early glass, a tiny statue, and some fragments of bone inlay, all ranging from the second to fourth centuries BC. He said the items were so distinctive they could have only come from a particular part of the region, a region now held by ISIS.
That it was so easy to find the items openly on sale in London “tells you the scale – we’re just seeing the tail end of it,” he says. Altaweel says that some of the items were represented as being from Jordan or India, but it was easy to spot that this was not the case.
ISIS selling antiquities on the Internet
ISIS has been destroying and looting historical sites and antiquities, broadcasting their destruction through the Internet to shock the world. But items that aren’t destroyed are looted, becoming valuables they sell to support their terror activities.
In truth, the looting of antiquities is now said to be the group’s second largest revenue source, next to banks and oil. “When Daesh (a derogatory Islamic name for ISIS) comes in, they take the looting and institutionalize it,” said Syrian archeologist Amr al-Azm, from Shawnee State University, according to the Guardian. “So it becomes part of their admin, their revenue-raising enterprise—it becomes more intensified, escalated and organized.”
It has been reported that ISIS uses Skype, Kik, Ebay, and other online outlets. Artnet.com is reporting that Bloomberg News recently discovered and exposed the attempted sale of a Mesopotamian vase, worth $250,000, being sold on Whatsapp.
The bottom line is this, once the items leave the Near East, if a good enough story about them can be concocted, they will end up on auction in London or New York, fetching some very high prices. Quite often, the story behind the antiquities involve the item “coming from a family collection.”
ISIS has become very sophisticated in their looting. They have the money, so they are now hiring experts; archeologists, digging teams and machinery to do the excavations. They now control the dealers and middlemen. They also make good use of the Internet to see where they can get the most money.
Looting by the terror group has become so widespread that UNESCO has started using satellites to observe the looting. By doing so, they have located a number of excavations. UNESCO is also collaborating with ICOM to issue “red lists” of artifacts from Iraq and Syria.
At a meeting last week, Irina Bokova, UNESCO Director-General, addressed experts on antiquities, stating that around 2,000 of Iraq’s 10,000 world-renowned sites have been heavily looted.
