The race to protect antiquities in Iraq, Syria
Sarah Lynch, Special for USA TODAY 6:28 p.m. EDT March 18, 2015

CAIRO — The Islamic State’s wanton destruction of priceless antiquities in the Middle East has triggered a global mobilization to safeguard these treasures, ranging from calls for airstrikes to special protections for untouched sites.

Iraq’s tourism and antiquities ministry is demanding the U.S.-led coalition against the militants use warplanes to strike the group’s machinery that is destroying relics in the region.

“This is human heritage, not Iraqi heritage, and the loss happening now is a loss for all humanity,” said Qais Hussein Rashid, Iraq’s deputy minister for tourism and antiquities. The coalition must “participate in protecting these historical places with whatever method they conceive suitable.”

Experts from the Louvre will travel to Baghdad soon to preserve antiquities threatened by the Islamic State, French President Francois Hollande announced Wednesday according to the Associated Press.

“We must do everything we can to preserve the treasures” of Iraq and Syria, Hollande said.

In Syria, a team supported by an international consortium called the Safeguarding the Heritage of Syria and Iraq Project recently put a layer of glue and cloth on Roman and Byzantine mosaics in the damaged Ma’arra Mosaic Museum — about 50 miles south of Aleppo — to protect them from further harm as a result of the nation’s 4-year-old civil war.

An image taken from a video released by the Islamic State shows its members destroying parts of a frieze at the ancient Iraqi town of Nimrud near Mosul, Iraq. The video confirms reports that the radical group has completely destroyed the ancient Assyrian ruins which date to the 13th century B.C. Islamic State via European Pressphoto Agency

Another group, dubbed the Monuments Men after the team that saved treasures from the Nazis during World War II, is working to document violations and damage done to historical sites in Syria and in some cases intervene to prevent damage, said Amr Al-Azm, an associate professor of Middle East History and Anthropology at Shawnee State University.

“These are the men and women who put their lives on the line everyday to try and basically save what they can of Syria’s cultural heritage,” said Al-Azm, who oversees the team.

Al-Azm said most activity to preserve cultural heritage in Syria has taken place in areas not under Islamic State control, where it is easier to work. He doesn’t know if the efforts will make a significant difference, but “doing nothing is not an option either,” he said.

“The scale of destruction is so massive, and we’re barely touching the surface,” he said. “While we do what we can, there is so much more to do and so little resources to do it with.”

In this image made from video posted on a social media account affiliated with the Islamic State group on Thursday, Feb. 26, 2015, which has been verified and is consistent with other AP reporting, a militant topples an ancient artifact in the Ninevah Museum in Mosul, Iraq. The extremist group has destroyed a number of shrines –including Muslim holy sites — in order to eliminate what it views as heresy. The militants are also believed to have sold ancient artifacts on the black market in order to finance their bloody campaign across the region. (AP Photo via militant social media account)

Back in Iraq, the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Ashur is under threat. Founded on the west bank of the Tigris in Iraq in the third millennium B.C., the city may be in the Islamic State’s cross hairs after bulldozers were reported to be moving in its direction last week, said Axel Plathe, director of the UNESCO Office for Iraq.

The Islamic State — also known as ISIL or ISIS — has targeted archaeological sites in a wave of destruction that dates back to June, when the tomb of prophet Younis, known in the Bible as Jonah, was bombed in the militant-held city of Mosul.

Since then, the group has destroyed religious antiquities and graves, burned manuscripts and waged a bombing campaign against monasteries and churches, Rashid said. The attacks are part of extremist backlash against objects they believe promote apostasy.

The group also steals and sells artifacts to fund their activities, Rashid said. Now, UNESCO has alerted member states, the art market and cultural institutions worldwide to look out for illicit trafficking of cultural property from Iraq and Syria.

“We must unite with global intention to preserve our common heritage and resist ISIS’ effort to steal not only our future freedom but also our history, the very roots of our civilization,” Deborah Lehr, chair of the United States-based Antiquities Coalition, said in a statement.

But the efforts are difficult to enforce since many looted artifacts crossing borders were not previously inventoried or were uncovered in illegal digs, meaning authorities trying to recover the items don’t know what to look for. Many objects are also trafficked on the black market, further obstructing their recovery.

The archaeological carnage may not stop anytime soon. In the past month, the Islamic State has bulldozed the 3,000-year-old city of Nimrud and the ancient ruins of Hatraand posted a video showing the destruction of priceless relics at the Mosul Museum, Rashid said.

“I’m horrified and disgusted,” said Jane Moon, an archaeologist working at a dig in southern Iraq. “But what can we do about it? I think the answer is nothing.”

An image grab taken off a video reportedly released by Media Office of the Nineveh branch of the Islamic State on Feb. 25, 2015, allegedly shows a militant destroying the statue of Lamassu, an Assyrian diety, with a jackhammer in the northern Iraqi Governorate of Nineveh. (Photo: Islamic State via AFP/Getty Images)

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ISIS assault on civilization  targets relics once saved  from looters
Published March 11, 2015 FoxNews.com

When Jabbar Jaafar watched video of ISIS members with sledge-hammers smashing artifacts as old as antiquity, the Iraqi-born cultural activist was outraged over a loss he described as immeasurable.

Jaafar’s anger at the destruction of Iraqi artifacts, relics and statues by terrorists prompted him and his colleague, Iraqi archeologist Abdulamir Al Hamdani at Stonybrook University, to protest outside the White House Tuesday with 100 other cultural activists. Jaafar and Al Hamdani work with the group Saving Antiquities for Everyone, or SAFE, an organization founded in 2003 in response to the looting of the Iraq Museum during which thousands of objects were taken — some 3,000 to 7,000 are still missing.

“I couldn’t sleep that night,” Jaafar said, after watching the videotaped destruction by ISIS of artifacts in Mosul last month. “These objects are as old as civilization.”

A protester is seen Tuesday outside the White House to urge the administration to stop ISIS from destroying ancient artifacts in Iraq and Syria. (Marie Helene Carleton/Four Corners Media)

“ISIS is destroying the heritage of mankind,” said Jaafar, who came from Iraq to the U.S. in 2008 and worked for the Iraqi Cultural Center in northern Virginia. “These pieces — more than 3,000 years old — are gone forever. They can never be replaced.”

The latest target of the Islamic State is Hatra, a 2,000-year-old city and archaeological site in northern Iraq that had parts demolished by ISIS militants last week, according to Kurdish officials. The terrorists damaged and looted the city one day after bulldozing the historic city of Nimrud.

Hatra, located 68 miles southwest of the city of Mosul, was a large fortified city during the Parthian Empire and capital of the first Arab kingdom. A UNESCO world heritage site, Hatra is said to have withstood invasions by the Romans in A.D. 116 and 198 thanks to its high, thick walls reinforced by towers. The ancient trading center spanned 4 miles in circumference and was supported by more than 160 towers. At its heart are a series of temples with a grand temple at the center — a structure supported by columns that once rose to 100 feet.

Protesters are seen Tuesday outside the White House to urge the administration to stop ISIS from destroying ancient artifacts in Iraq and Syria. (Marie Helene Carleton/Four Corners Media)

“The destruction of Hatra marks a turning point in the appalling strategy of cultural cleansing under way in Iraq,” said Irina Bokova, the director-general of UNESCO, and Abdulaziz Othman Altwaijri, director general of the Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (ISESCO) in a joint statement.

“With this latest act of barbarism against Hatra, shows the contempt in which it holds the history and heritage of Arab people.”

The Sunni extremist group, which currently controls about a third of Syria and Iraq, is bent on demolishing any symbols it says promotes idolatry and violates its interpretation of Islamic law.

A video ISIS released last week shows militants smashing artifacts in the Mosul museum — the majority of which came from Hatra. In January, the terror group also burned hundreds of books from the Mosul library and Mosul.

On Friday, the group looted artifacts from Nimrud, a 3,000-year-old city in Iraq, and bulldozed it in a move United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon declared “a war crime.”

“Ancient Mesopotamia is really the cradle of civilization — where we saw the first farming, the first cities, the first writing,” Jack Green, chief curator at the Oriental Institute Museum at the University of Chicago, told FoxNews.com.

In this July 27, 2005 file photo, the face of a woman stares down at visitors in the Hatra ruins, 200 miles north of Baghdad, Iraq. Iraq’s minister of tourism and antiquities told the AP on Saturday that the government is investigating reports that the ancient archaeological site of Hatra in northwestern Iraq is being demolished by militants from the Islamic State group. (AP)

“There’s a huge amount of knowledge and that knowledge is being destroyed systematically,” Green said. “They’re not only destroying images of things – like artwork – but they’re also looting artifacts and then smuggling them away.”

The black market for ancient artifacts is a profitable avenue for ISIS as it continues to build its funds.

Green is urging people worldwide not to purchase antiquities, saying, “You may be acquiring objects that were taken from these sites.”

“If so, you are supporting ISIS,” Green said.

The international group The Antiquities Coalition on Wednesday called for the U.S. and other nations to crack down on the sale of looted artifacts, acts considered war crimes under international law.

“ISIS is arming its campaign of terror in part by selling the past and robbing future generations of our history,” said Deborah Lehr, co-founder of The Antiquities Coalition. “We must constrict the terrorists’ ability to profit from the sale of plundered antiquities.

“If we don’t act now, there may be no past left to protect,” she added. “With each artifact looted and sold onto the international market, only criminals, insurgents, terrorists — and the most unscrupulous of collectors — profit. The rest of us all lose.”

In this July 27, 2005 file photo, a temple to the Shamash sun god still stands over 1,750 years after the Sassanian empire razed the Mesopotamian city of Hatra, 200 miles north of Baghdad, Iraq. (AP)

The Islamic State’s push to demolish history hasn’t hit Baghdad, where officials reopened Iraq’s National Museum on Saturday — more than a decade after some 15,000 objects were stolen during the U.S. occupation of the country. According to the AFP, the museum opened its doors earlier than expected in response to the destruction of artifacts in Mosul last month by ISIS.

“The events in Mosul led us to speed up our work and we wanted to open it [the museum] today [Saturday] as a response to what the gangs of IS did,” Qais Hussein Rashid, the deputy tourism and antiquities minister, told AFP.

“This is a very happy day,” he said.

The museum, also known as the Baghdad Archaeological Museum, contains exhibits ranging from bone and stone tools used 100,000 years ago by Stone Age hunter-gatherers in modern-day northern Iraq, artifacts from the Sumerian and Old Babylonian dynasties, including 5,000-year-old carved limestone statues, and numerous relics and treasures from Babylon, the rise of Islam more than 1,000 years ago and modern times.

Iraqi museums, mosques, churches, schools and government buildings are awash in priceless artifacts, but the embattled nation’s historians and archaeologists fear for what is being lost every day. The Baghdad Museum’s website features a terse indictment of the terror group on an all black homepage.

“2015: ISIS destroys what is left of ancient history,” it reads.

FoxNews.com’s Cristina Corbin and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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The illegal antiquities trade funded the Iraqi insurgency. Now it’s funding the Islamic State.
By Reid Wilson March 9, 2015

“They don’t have opium in the Middle East. What they do have is antiquities. It’s the cash crop.”

The ancient statue of a winged bull with a human face in Nimrud, Iraq. Last week, the Islamic State militant group destroyed the site.(Karim Sahib/AFP via Getty Images)

Last week, the Islamic State bulldozed Nimrud, the 7th-century B.C. capital of the neo-Assyrian Empire, then the most powerful nation-state on Earth.* Videos showed militants defacing and destroying massive statues of winged bulls and lions. On Saturday, they took aim at another ancient site, Hatra, a 2,000-year-old city built by the Parthians. It was the capital of the first Arab kingdom.

Human history is under assault in Iraq, and some of the irreparable damage is our fault. More than a decade of war in Iraq has taken an incredible toll on our cultural heritage, both in terms of priceless works of art and sites that hold evidence of some of the earliest civilizations in human history.

It didn’t have to be this way. Before the invasion, the U.S. military actively planned to avoid harming some of the most important archaeological sites in Iraq. In October 2001, the Pentagon contacted some of the most prominent Afghanistan and Iraq archaeology experts in the United States to compile a list of sites the military should protect in both countries.

Nimrud was on the list. So was the Iraq Museum.

Despite that planning, the U.S. military did its own damage: In ancient Babylon, an American-built helipad destroyed several nearby buildings.

And in the fog of war, many young American soldiers quite understandably prioritized their own safety and that of the population over what they saw as little more than clay tablets.

In the days after the U.S.-led invasion, American soldiers stood by and watched as looters stormed the Iraq Museum and ransacked its vast collections. The looters carted off an estimated 15,000 items — among them some of the best-known artifacts left behind by civilizations long since lost to history. (Donny George, the curator, saved thousands of other items by hiding them in the museum’s underground vaults, literally cementing them into the walls.) The thieves knew what they were looking for, which suggested that they had been given orders by wealthy collectors.

When the museum reopened last month, only about 9,000 of those items were recovered.

Senior U.S. government officials did not take the looting seriously. In a news conference in 2003, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld joked about it: “The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over, and over, and over, and it’s the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it 20 times, and you think, ‘My goodness, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?’” Rumsfeld asked. Reporters in the room laughed.

But those vases were bringing in millions of dollars to fund the insurgency that targeted American soldiers, according to Matthew Bogdanos, a Marine colonel and assistant district attorney in New York City who investigated the illegal antiquities trade.

“The Taliban learned to finance their terror through opium,” he said. “They don’t have opium in the Middle East. What they do have is antiquities. It’s the cash crop.”

Wealthy collectors in Europe, Asia and even the United States used the Iraq war to build their own private museums — and their money helped fund both the insurgency that claimed the lives of so many American soldiers then and the Islamic State now.

Bogdanos’s investigation traced tens of millions of dollars from the sale of stolen artifacts to the coffers of the Iraqi insurgency. When I spoke to him in 2007, while reporting a story on the looted Iraqi artifacts for National Journal, he was unequivocal: Collectors in Europe, Japan and, yes, the United States “buy the weapons and bombs that are killing U.S. military personnel.”

Interpol, the international police organization based in France, even set up a special unit in its stolen-art department dedicated to finding and repatriating artifacts stolen from Iraq.

So far, it hasn’t done much good. The Antiquities Coalition, a group that battles cultural racketeering and advocates stronger laws against trafficking, says it has seen an uptick in the number of artifacts from Iraq and Syria for sale on the collectors market in the past few months. Both the U.N. Security Council and the Financial Action Task Force, an international body tasked with countering terrorist financing and money laundering, have issued findings citing the Islamic State’s role in the antiquities trade.

“It really is a massive illegal industry, especially in Syria. It’s organized, and ISIS is taking a very business-like approach to it,” said Tess Davis, the coalition’s executive director, using an acronym for the Islamic State. “The only people to profit from this are criminals, are terrorists and the very unscrupulous collectors.”

Even if the stolen artifacts are recovered, they will be far less valuable to the archaeologists and anthropologists who study them. By removing them, looters rob objects of their provenance — the information about where an object was found, in what stratum of soil and in what relation to other objects, information that is as valuable, in many cases, as the item itself.

The mass looting of cultural heritage is nothing new. Davis pointed to Nazi looting of Jewish heritage in Warsaw, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamian Buddhas in Afghanistan. But what is new is the way art dealers and looters are making it possible for terrorist organizations to survive and thrive. “It’s not just about rocks and pots and even ancient palaces and ruins,” she said. “This is really a threat to the people of Iraq.”

And protecting Iraq’s cultural heritage was incumbent on the United States, too. The Pentagon failed to make adequate plans, and greedy collectors helped fund those who would target American troops.

In 2003, Army Col. Christopher Varhola, who helped compile the list of cultural sites to protect, sent an e-mail to one of the professors he had consulted after he inspected the looting of the Iraq Museum: “We have left our mark on history,” he wrote. “But so too did the Mongols and the Vandals. I do not understand why I expected us to be any different.”

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ISIS Bulldozing of Ancient Nimrud Site in Iraq Stirs Outrage
By RICK GLADSTONE and SOMINI SENGUPTA MARCH 6, 2015

A relief of a mythological creature in the Palace of Ashurnasirpal II in Nimrud, Iraq. Militants used bulldozers and other vehicles to vandalize the site. Credit DeAgostini/Getty Images

News that Islamic State fighters had bulldozed and vandalized the ancient city of Nimrud in northern Iraq provoked outrage on Friday, as archaeologists despaired that the militant group was systematically destroying priceless antiquities in a wellspring of civilization.

Islamic religious scholars joined common cause with governments, museums and other international preservationists to denounce what they described as an odious affront.

Al-Azhar, Sunni Islam’s leading religious institution, based in Cairo, called the destruction “a major crime against the entire world.”

The top cultural official at the United Nations called the destruction a war crime that should be taken up by the International Criminal Court, and she vowed to do “whatever is needed” to stop the plundering by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL.

“This is yet another attack against the Iraqi people, reminding us that nothing is safe from the cultural cleansing underway in the country,” said the official, Irina Bokova, who is director general of Unesco, the United Nations organization for education, science and culture.

By The New York Times

“It targets human lives, minorities, and is marked by the systematic destruction of humanity’s ancient heritage,” Ms. Bokova said in a statement on the Unesco website.

Iraq’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities confirmed on Thursday that Islamic State militants had used bulldozers and other heavy vehicles to vandalize an important archaeological site at Nimrud, about 18 miles southeast of Mosul, the northern Iraqi city seized by the group in June.

Nimrud was founded more than 3,300 years ago as a central city of the Assyrian empire, and today is considered one of the most important archaeological sites in the world. Its remaining statues, frescos and other works are widely revered.

“Every person on the planet should pause after yesterday’s violent attack on humanity’s heritage and understand ISIS’ intent not only to control the future of humankind but also to erase and rewrite our past,” said Deborah M. Lehr, chairwoman and co-founder of the Antiquities Coalition, a Washington-based archaeological advocacy group.

“We must unite with global intention to preserve our common heritage and resist ISIS’ effort to steal not only our future freedom but also our history, the very roots of our civilization,” she said in a statement on its website.

The Nimrud destruction came a week after Islamic State militants videotaped themselves marauding through Mosul’s museum, using sledgehammers and torches to destroy statues, artifacts and books. “They’re taking us back to the dark ages, those people,” said Mohamed Alhakim, Iraq’s ambassador to the United Nations. “They are thugs.”

Ms. Bokova, who was visiting the United Nations headquarters in New York on Friday to attend a Security Council meeting over the plundering of artifacts in northern Iraq, said in an interview that “protecting cultural heritage is not a luxury, it’s an imperative.”

Asserting that she had not been taken seriously over worries about cultural looting and destruction at the start of the Syrian conflict four years ago, Ms. Bokova expressed hope that governments around the world, spurred by a Security Council resolution passed nearly four months ago, would now strengthen customs officers and courts to crack down on pilfered antiquities.

Ms. Bokova said Unesco had been working with auction houses, Interpol, and officials from several countries to track the trade in stolen objects.

Islamic State leaders have sought to justify the cultural destruction by asserting that statues and other artifacts violate Islamic prohibitions on idol worship. But religious authorities have called all such destruction barbaric and anti-Islamic.

Archaeologists and antiquities experts have also accused the Islamic State of profiting from many plundered antiquities. Some have said the looters take small objects that they can sell, and destroy those that are too heavy to be easily smuggled.

Abdulamir al-Hamdani, an Iraqi archaeologist who specializes in Mesopotamia at the Department of Anthropology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, said in a telephone interview that Mosul residents had seen Islamic State fighters removing artifacts in order to sell them. He expressed alarm that the next target could be the ruins of Hatra, about 68 miles southwest of Mosul, which is also within the area controlled by the Islamic State.

Hatra, thought to have been founded in the third or second century B.C., became an important religious center that was ruled by a succession of Arabian princes, and is one of several Unesco World Heritage sites in the region.

“I’m really worried about Hatra now,” Mr. Hamdani said. “ISIS has a plan to destroy them one by one.”

Susan Ackerman, a religion professor at Dartmouth College, where the Hood Museum of Art is home to a number of Assyrian artifacts, said she feared that Khorsabad, another ancient Assyrian city north of Mosul, also was imperiled.

Asked why Islamic State fighters would loot some artifacts and destroy others, she said, “I don’t have much of an answer except to tell you they’re hypocrites.”

“They’re willing to be self-righteous and ideological about the things that are too big to move, and ruthlessly opportunistic about the small things they can smuggle on the black market,” Ms. Ackerman said.

Ms. Bokova said her agency did not have specific information about who was trading in looted artifacts, except that previous incidents, namely in Mali, suggested that they were part of the networks that raise money for extremists by trading in oil, drugs and guns.

“They’re the same criminal groups,” she said. “They’re not, how to put it, admirers of art.”

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CUNY John Jay College of Criminal Justice
March 4, 2015

As part of its “Criminal Justice Matters” series with Stephen Handelman, CUNY TV recently featured Antiquities Coalition Co-Founder Peter Herdrich and John Jay College Professor Erin Thompson in a half hour discussion on the global black market for art and antiquities, and the growing role of terrorist organizations such as ISIL in this cultural racketeering.