ISIL believed to be looting ancient sites

Destruction videos a ruse, Iraqi expert says

BAGHDAD — The videos of ISIL militants destroying ancient artifacts in Iraq’s museums and blowing up 3,000-year-old temples are chilling enough, but one of Iraq’s top antiquities officials is now saying the destruction is a cover for an even more sinister activity — the systematic looting of Iraq’s cultural heritage.

In the videos that appeared in April, militants can be seen taking sledge hammers to the iconic winged-bulls of Assyria and sawing apart floral reliefs in the palace of Ashurnasirpal II in Nimrud before the entire site is blown up. But according to Qais Hussein Rashid, head of Iraq’s State Board for Antiquities and Heritage, that was just the final step in a deeper game.

“According to our sources, (ISIL) started days before destroying this site by digging in this area, mainly the palace,” he told The Associated Press from his office next to Iraq’s National Museum — itself a target of looting after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein. “We think that they first started digging around these areas to get the artifacts, then they started demolishing them as a cover up.”

While there is no firm evidence of the amount of money being made by ISIL from looting antiquities, satellite photos and anecdotal evidence confirm widespread plundering of archeological sites in areas under ISIL control.

Nimrud was also the site of one of the greatest discoveries in Iraqi history, stunning golden jewelry from a royal tomb found in 1989, and Rashid is worried that more such tombs lie beneath the site and have been plundered. He estimated the potential income from looting to be in the millions of dollars.

Experts speculate that the large pieces are destroyed with sledgehammers and drills for the benefit of the cameras, while the more portable items like figurines, masks and ancient clay cuneiform tablets are smuggled to dealers in Turkey.

On Wednesday, Egypt, together with the Antiquities Coalition and the Washington-based Middle East Institute will be holding a conference in Cairo entitled “Cultural Property Under Threat” to come up with regional solutions to the plundering and sale of antiquities.

This isn’t the first time, of course, that Iraq’s antiquities have fallen victim to current events. There was the infamous looting of the museum in 2003 and reports of widespread plundering of archaeological sites in the subsequent years, especially in the south. U.S. investigators at the time said al-Qaida was funding its activities with illicit sales of antiquities.

What appears to be different this time is the sheer scale and systematic nature of the looting, especially in the parts of Syria controlled by ISIL.