In the dark nights of Palmyra, groups of men armed with picks, shovels and jackhammers move silently through the ruins. Their goal is not memory, nor preservation of the past: they search for buried treasures, ancient coins, carved busts, mosaics. They date back more than 2,000 years, and have remained underground until today, when the end of Bashar al-Assad’s regime left an institutional vacuum and Syria’s cultural heritage became accessible prey for local looters and international traffickers.
The scene is repeated nightly in different parts of the country, but in Palmyra, a city of Hellenistic origin dating back to the third century B.C., the wounds are visible to the naked eye. Craters three meters wide pierce the desert landscape. Some are dug by hand, others by professional equipment. We are talking about the same city that already experienced devastation in 2015, when the Islamic State, considering its ruins symbols of idolatry, blew up numerous sections of it.
Ancient burial crypts, which once held the remains of the Empire’s aristocrats and nobles, are now being raided by a population that seeks daily survival in the tombs. The phenomenon is not new, but it has reached unprecedented levels since the rebels finally overthrew Assad last December. According to data released by theAntiquities Traffickingand Heritage Anthropology Research Project (ATHAR), nearly a third of the 1,500 cases of trafficking documented in Syria since 2012 have occurred in the past few months alone. Syria, nestled in the center of the fertile crescent, is one of the countries with the highest concentration of historical and archaeological artifacts in the Middle East. Mosaics, statues, inscriptions, ceramics: everything has value. And everything can be sold.
The reasons for this are many. Which ones? On the one hand, widespread impoverishment-an estimated 90 percent of the population lives in poverty. On the other, the collapse of the repressive apparatus that, for decades, had strictly policed cultural sites. With no more archaeological police, army or customs able to control the flow out of the country, unauthorized excavation activity has increased, but also the sophistication of distribution channels for looted goods. Many of these channels go through social networks. Facebook, in particular, has become the hub of the illegal art market. The ATHAR project has collected more than 26,000 images, screenshots, and videos posted by Syrian or Middle Eastern users selling cultural artifacts online. The offerings range from simple Roman coins to complete floor mosaics to stone busts or carved sarcophagi. In a video from March, for example, a man uses his smartphone to show a mosaic still in the ground depicting Zeus on a throne. In a later photo, the same work appears already extracted and ready to be sold. “This is just one of four mosaics we have,” the man declares in the video.
“When the (Assad) regime fell, we saw a huge spike on the ground. It was a complete breakdown of any constraints that might have existed in the regime periods that controlled the loot,” said Amr al-Azm, professor of Middle Eastern history and anthropology at Shawnee State University in Ohio and co-director of the ATHAR project.
Collected accounts also show instances where looters broadcast their excavations live on Facebook, asking other users for advice on where to dig or how to value newly surfaced finds. Direct selling begins on the social network and often continues with delivery of the objects across borders, through criminal networks operating between Syria, Jordan, and Turkey. Once the antiquities cross the borders, they are fitted with fake documents attesting to their legal provenance. After a period of “quarantine” in the gray art market, they re-emerge in official auctions or private collections in the United States and Europe. The response of the Syrian authorities has so far been limited. Indeed, the new government has promised incentives to those who return the artifacts and has provided penalties of up to 15 years in prison for offenders. In any case, resources are tight and the country’s priorities-urban reconstruction, humanitarian emergency, political consolidation-leave the protection of archaeological heritage in the background. Some residents, like Fares, who recently returned to Palmyra after years of displacement, try to oppose looting by organizing night patrols to guard the ruins. But the shattered stones at the foot of the Triumphal Arch and the devastated sarcophagi of the Tomb of the Three Brothers are reminders that the devastation has already happened, and it continues.
“These different layers are important, when people mix them together, it will be impossible for archaeologists to understand what they are looking at,” said Mohammed al-Fares, a Palmyra resident and activist with the NGO Heritage for Peace, while standing in the remains of an ancient crypt exhumed by looters.
“They are doing this day and night. I’m afraid for my safety, so I don’t go near them,” claimed a researcher with a guard dog in Salamiya.
Meanwhile, professional metal detectors have appeared in stores in Damascus and Homs, such as the XTREM Hunter, which sells for more than $2,000, an unaffordable amount for most Syrians, but not for those who see antique hunting as a possible way out of misery. Ads on social media show ordinary users discovering buried vases, coins and tools, fueling the myth of easy enrichment. Not all looters are improvisers. Some operate as part of actual organizations, capable of quickly moving even bulky objects such as mosaics or sculptures. At Tall Shaykh Ali, a Bronze Age site in central Syria, for example, an activist documented the systematic destruction of tombs and structures with a video. Every few meters, holes five meters deep dot the ground, excavations requiring the use of heavy machinery. In other cases, mosaics were removed intact from the ground, with no visible damage, a sign of skilled personnel’s intervention.
“The last three or four months have been the biggest surge in antiquities trafficking I’ve ever seen, from any country,” adds Katie Paul, co-director of the ATHAR project and director of the Tech Transparency Project. “This is the fastest we’ve ever seen artifacts being sold. Before, for example, a mosaic being sold from Raqqa took a year. Now, mosaics are sold in two weeks. Trafficking in cultural property during the conflict is a crime, here you have Facebook acting as a vehicle for the crime. Facebook knows that this is a problem.”
In addition, Paul pointed out that he keeps an eye on dozens of groups dedicated to the antiques trade on Facebook, some of which exceed 100,000 members; the main one has about 900,000 members. International authorities and large digital platforms have been slow to react. Facebook announced in 2020 an outright ban on the sale of archaeological goods, pledging to remove any content in violation of the policy. However, according to ATHAR project experts, enforcement of such rules is sporadic and ineffective. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, has avoided commenting on the results of the investigation. The flow of assets continues. Syrian antiquities move across borders, take on a new identity in documents, and end up in the windows of auction houses in London, Paris, New York. The cycle can last as long as 10 or 15 years, enough time to make the original provenance untraceable. The pieces are “cleaned up,” legalized and sold at astronomical prices to collectors or cultural institutions who, often unwittingly, fuel the market. The debate then shifts outside Syria. According to experts, the only way to curb the phenomenon is to intervene in the demand side by holding Western buyers accountable and forcing auction houses to verify the provenance of the goods. But precedent shows that international regulation struggles to keep up with the speed of traffic, and document checks are often formal.
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| From Syrian tombs to Western museums: trafficking in antiquities after the fall of Assad |
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