illicit antiquities trading in economic crisis, organised crime and political violence
I’ve continued to update my original post on Islamic State’s attack on Mosul Museum and the Nergal Gate Museum at Nineveh and am working on more, but there is one report that I want to address straight away on its own: “IS burns 4 members in Mosul for refusing to destroy museum”.
Consolidating my attempt to piece together evidence of terrorist antiquities trading and state arms smuggling between Syria and Turkey (with testimony of antiquities trafficking by air), there is new evidence that a Turkish intelligence agent not only smuggled weapons from Turkey into Syria, but also smuggled antiquities from Syria into Turkey.
It is notable that the Islamic State released this propaganda, to assert their religious purity through their commitment to cultural destruction, immediately after the were exposed for making a deal with Turkey and not destroying Suleyman Shah’s tomb.
Last June, it was rumoured and mistakenly reported that the Islamic State had ‘destroyed ancient masterpieces, including the rare Assyrian winged bull’ at Nineveh Museum. This time, they’ve done it – at Mosul Museum and the Nergal Gate to Nineveh [the Nergal Gate Museum at Nineveh]. You can stream or download the mp4 (or watch it on YouTube/YouTube archive).
But if, like other sensible people, you don’t want to boost the web traffic to their pornography of violence – which they try to advertise as Islamic although they also preserve “heretical”, “idolatrous” things as long as they profit from them – I’ve taken screenshots from the video for verification and analysis. Christopher Jones, at the Gates of Nineveh, has ongoing, historically-informed coverage of this and other destruction, including Assessing the Damage at the Mosul Museum, Part 1: the Assyrian Artifacts.
It’s difficult to headline or even strapline the story of these events, but Turkey has extracted sarcophagi and other artefacts from a Turkish exclave that is surrounded by Islamic State-held Syrian territory, and apparently deliberately destroyed the mausoleum that housed the tombs. What, you might justifiably ask, the fuck is going on?
UNESCO has published the text of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2199.(1) As expected, it prohibits any international trade in Syrian antiquities that have been exported since the 15th of March 2011. It also reaffirms its prohibition of any international trade in Iraqi antiquities that have been exported since the 6th of August 1990 (which certainly suggests that this legislation will not suffice on its own).
Lask week, the World Today published an article on the conflict antiquities trade by me and Sasan Aghlani (@Aghlani), a Research Assistant in International Security at Chatham House and PhD student in Politics and International Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). He’s written elsewhere on the role of violence against religious property in conflict (the power of sacred geography in Iraq). Apart from giving it the superlative title, the World Today has kindly given us permission to share the fully-sourced text here. (Sources were provided for fact-checking during editing, but not published in the magazine.)
The details of Operation Aureus (within Spain, Operation Hieratica) – a massive and remarkable Europol-coordinated, Interpol-assisted, UNESCO-supported investigation – are beginning to emerge. (Paul Barford has been keeping track of the news.) Now, a new report claims that the Egyptian-Spanish antiquities supply line was run to fund the Islamic State [but no evidence has yet been presented].
conflict antiquities 