THE SEVERED head of an Assyrian king was exhibited to the world in April. It was not the real thing of course, unlike the severed heads that Islamic State display in their grotesque propaganda videos, but a carved limestone treasure looted from Iraq and later recovered by America’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency or ICE.
The head of Sargon II was part of a haul of 60 Iraqi cultural artifacts smuggled into the United States by a Dubai-based dealer. Its estimated worth in the burgeoning trade in so-called “blood antiques” is $1.2 million.
The ICE operation is well named for this shipment is but the tip of an iceberg concealing a huge, multi-national underground trade in illicit archaeological and cultural items.
There’s nothing new about looting in the world of archeology; indeed some 19th century archaeologists were little more than opportunistic plunderers. Nor is it novel for terrorists to fund their activities from the sale of cultural artefacts; this happened on a large scale in Peru in the 1980s. What is new however is the massive scale of digging that is going on in areas now controlled by the terror start-up known as Islamic State, or IS.
Islamic State operates in the arguably the richest archaeological arena in the world, the cradle of civilization. Ancient sites at Nimrud, Nineveh and Hatra have been destroyed and artifacts suspected of coming from such places have flooded the black market. More than 100 Syrian antiquities are said have been sold in London, where Scotland Yard has four investigations in progress.
IS may have made a public display of smashing ancient Assyrian ‘idols’ in Mosul and Nineveh but this professionally organised terrorist start-up profits also from what it can sell.
Small items are easier to move. Mosaics are particularly attractive and are removed by placing a cloth with dissolvable glue over the stones and then lifting them up. Other trending plunder includes cuneiform tablets, cylinder seals, jars, coins and glass.
“Demand from Western collectors is very high” says Dr Mark Altaweel of University College London. “There’s also a specific requirement for pre-Islamic art.”
The objects pass along well established, often ancient trading routes to ports such as Beirut, Istanbul, Cairo or in the Gulf States. In cases of larger, and therefore more valuable items, photos will often have been viewed and prices agreed before shipment to the buyer, with IS providing armed escorts to and from borders.
With Islamic State’s encircling policy giving it complete control of a crescent of territory across northern Syria and Iraq running from Aleppo to Mosul, and another corridor of land from Raqqa to Fallujah, access to Turkey has been greatly facilitated but experts believe that while goods may be ‘touted’ in Istanbul, many are exported via an older market, Beirut.
Syrian born Amr Al-Azm of Shawnee University, Ohio, defines two type of looting – the institutionalised work of Islamic State and ‘subsistence’ looting by displaced people many of whom are on the brink of starvation. The former is by the far the most egregious.
The professor provides an extraordinary snapshot of what is going in at the great sites of antiquity in the Middle and Near East.
“Islamic State or ISIS did not start the looting. They came across a pre-existing situation and institutionalised it,” he says. “At first there was a casual arrangement to loot whereby IS applied an obscure Islamic tax of 20 per cent payable to the ‘State Treasury’ but since the beginning of 2015 this has been formalised. Now you now have to have a licence issued by an ‘archaeological administration’ office with punishments if you are caught digging an area where you are not allowed.”
The reason for the tightening of controls, Professor Al-Azm suggests, is partly that other sources of funding for IS – oil, arms and drugs – have been squeezed.
“IS are knowledgeable about the value of the antiquities, they check the Internet and we suspect some are archaeologists.”
The big question, what the trade is worth, cannot be answered simply, or indeed at all. There’s just no data, moreover clandestine objects are worth a fraction of those with legal provenance. Chris Marinello of London-based Art Recovery Group, which is building a database of lost art and advises on provenance, says it could be as little as 10 – 20 per cent. Nevertheless, Professor Al-Azm has seen photos of a collection of carvings being offered at $250,000 and another of mosaics priced at $40,000.
To give a historical perspective, an estimated $200 million of objects were being looted from the burial mounds and ancient cities of Anatolia every year – a trade which mushroomed in the 1960s under Mafia-style outfits run by Istanbul families.
Art theft in the Iraq War of 1991 which saw the wholesale looting of the Baghdad Museum was estimated to have caused $10 billion worth of damage – a highly speculative figure.
In the present conflict, increasingly urgent calls are being made to stop the destruction of an ancient heritage that belongs to all mankind. Britain is under intense pressure to sign the decades-old Hague Convention protecting cultural heritage.
“At a time when there is appalling destruction of ancient sites, libraries, archives and museums in the Middle East and Africa… I am bewildered as to why ratification has not occurred,” said John Lewis, General secretary of the Society of Antiquaries of London.
In other moves, the International Council of Museums (Icom) has an online guide to pillaged artifacts on Facebook.
Lebanon has pledged to police illicit antiquities better, while Unesco, which considers the destruction of Iraqi cultural property a war crime, has developed the #Unite4Heritage campaign.
Finally and most dramatically perhaps, the US is moving to create a new charge of aiding terrorism in cases where people buy art known to have been obtained from IS.
This is a far cry from the 1991 Iraqi conflict, when Ashton Hawkings – former secretary and counsel of the Metropolitan Museum of New York and an art collector to boot – opined that “the legitimate dispersal of cultural material through the market” was the best way to protect treasures. Unfortunately, such views are still upheld by a minority.