PARIS: Ancient Iraqi artefacts are appearing on the black market as Islamic State militants use intermediaries to sell priceless treasures to finance their activities after sweeping through the north of the country, Iraqi and Western officials said.
The militants gained some experience of dealing in antiquities after taking control of large parts of Syria, but when they captured the northern Iraqi city of Mosul and the Nineveh province in June, they gained access to almost 2,000 of Iraq’s 12,000 registered archaeological sites.
Speaking at a conference at the UN cultural agency Unesco in Paris to warn of the risk to Iraq’s heritage, Qais Hussein Rasheed, head of the Baghdad Museum, said organised groups were working in coordination with Islamic State. “It’s an international artefacts’ mafia,” he said.
“They identify the items and say what they can sell,” he said. Since some of these items were more than 2,000 years old it was difficult to know exactly their value.
Citing local officials still in Islamic State-controlled areas, Rasheed said the biggest example of looting so far had taken place at the 9th century BC grand palace at Kalhu of the Assyrian King Ashurnasirpal II. “Assyrian tablets were stolen and found in European cities,” he said. “Some of these items are cut up and sold piecemeal,” he said, referring to a tablet of a winged bull.
A Western diplomat said it was too early to assess exactly how much from Iraq had crossed the borders. “We’ve seen hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Syrian pieces pop up after their sites were looted, so it’s not unreasonable to expect the same for Iraq,” he said.
Reuters
