Syria’s archaeological riches face threat of looting

0:0050 years ago, Congress set out to protect coal miners from black lung disease. Today, it's back at rates not seen in half a century. These guys are being treated like disposable widgets, not human beings. On the Sunday Story, why coal miners in Appalachia are getting sicker faster. Listen now to the Sunday Story from the Up First podcast on the NPR app.

0:26Today on State of the World, protecting Syria's archaeological treasures from looting.

0:36You're listening to State of the World from NPR, the day's most vital international stories, up close where they're happening. I'm Christine Arismath. During Syria's civil war, the country's archaeologists risked and sometimes lost their lives in an effort to save tens of thousands of ancient relics across the country. But since the end of that war more than a year and a half ago, Cultural heritage experts are warning that Syria's antiquities are facing new dangers. NPR's Emily Fang went to Syria and has the story. In times of old, the Syrian town of Marat al-Numan was famed for its colored stone, which went into its breathtaking Byzantine-era mosaics.

1:19Before the war, visitors from the world over came to see them. But by 2012 came Syria's civil war, and Marat al-Numan in northwest Syria became a battleground, between rebels and government soldiers. They did not care. No museum, no culture. This is Abdelhai Kudor, a guide who used to take tourists to visit the mosaics regularly before the war. He points to where a large floor mosaic once was, now trampled by tanks. They have tanks here, they have the army, they can roll, they did anything. Majd Mazloum, one of the museum's caretakers, says local residents tried to protect the surviving mosaics afterwards.

2:01By removing them, wrapping them in mesh, and hiding them. But now that the war is over, these mosaics and Syria's enormous store of ancient treasures are at risk from something else. From looting. Drive across the Syrian countryside outside the ancient cities of Damascus and Aleppo, and you will see fresh holes, mostly dug by hand by Syrians who are treasure hunting. Kador demonstrates how looting happens. We're now on the grounds of Sergila, a city built in the 5th century but abandoned more than 1 ,200 years ago. And as we walk through the stone ruins, he pauses every few seconds to tap the earth with a wooden stick.

2:49He says for looters, that hollow sound means there could be an empty space underneath, perhaps containing pottery or gold. And soon we come across some haphazardly dug holes. Here's one right in front of me now. Pretty shallow. They must have dug just a few days ago. It looks like they found a jar, broke it open, and took whatever was inside. Heritage experts are worried about this looting. I mean, looting, unfortunately, has exploded since the fall of the regime. This is Amr al-Azm. He is a Syrian archaeology professor at Shawnee State University in Ohio, and a longtime advisor to Syria's Museums and Antiquities Agency.

3:32Looking at, essentially, Facebook and other social media platforms. Before arriving in Syria, he showed me public social media groups with hundreds, sometimes thousands of members, featuring artifacts touted as Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman. These groups have posted more looted Syrian-origin antiquities for sale in the last year than any year during the Civil War. That's according to the Antiquities Trafficking and Heritage Anthropology Research Project, or ATHAR, a group Azam's part of that's tracking antiquities trafficking. In Syria, Azam says everyone essentially lives on top of an archaeological site, so looting is an easy way to make money.

4:12The deterioration in the economic situation. When the economy is stalled since the war ended, and there is little enforcement of long-standing anti-looting laws. Still fairly fragile security conditions. As the new government struggles to assert control over the country. Ayman Mustafa Nabo, deputy director at Sirius Museums and Antiquities Agency, said in response to an NPR request for comment that the country is making progress in controlling looting. Looting had skyrocketed immediately after the Assad regime collapsed, but Nabo said there's been a, quote, gradual but substantial decline in looting during the second year of the new government, largely because state security forces are working with the interior ministry to crack down.

4:58Azzam disagrees that things are getting better, but he says Syrian authorities are doing what they can with limited resources. He argues cultural preservation is central to helping Syrians heal from a civil war that pitted communities against one another and ruptured society along multiple lines. Social, economic, sectarian, ethnic. When so much has happened to us, the only shared common denominator I see today is our shared common history, our shared past. But even antiquities in Syria's museums are at risk of theft and degradation from moisture and heat. This includes the tens of thousands of statues, cuneiform tablets and other priceless antiquities saved during the war, an effort in part organized by Mahmoud Abdelkareem.

5:50In 2012, we preserved all the objects underground in the warehouses. Abdelkareem was Syria's Director General of Antiquities and Museums in Damascus during the first half of the Civil War. He spearheaded an ambitious operation to ferry every museum's cache of ancient objects to the capital for safe storage. Despite the war, the violent, we transported 24 ,000 objects to Damascus. Homs 15 ,000, Hama Museum 5 ,000. And here in Damascus, all of those items remain in storage until the day Sears museums are restored and their treasures can be safely displayed once again. But that day is likely years off.

6:37These all have objects which are stored in them. Hazem recently gave me a tour of the subterranean depths under Damascus' National Museum. A lack of money to fix it means much of the museum remains closed to the public. There are these Green Army ammunition cases stacked up along the sides of the hallway. But inside it's not ammunition, it's artifacts. Artifacts. Some of the three truckloads of statues, reliefs, and mosaics from the ancient city of Palmyra, evacuated by Abdul Karim the night before the extremist group ISIS captured the city for the first time in 2015. That same year, ISIS executed one of Abdul Karim's colleagues, a prominent archaeologist named Khalid al-Assad, because he refused to tell the militants where they had hidden Palmyra's antiquities.

7:27Palmyra, there's one that's in here. We lift the wooden lid of one of the ammunition boxes. Oh, wow, there's just... Yeah, just a stone... Stone pillars? Stone, no, it's a stone relief. Stone relief, yeah. Converting, yeah, the face of a woman. It's a funerary statue, taken from a Palmyran tomb built nearly 2 ,000 years ago. The likeness of this long-dead woman, bejeweled and in a headdress, looks up at us, nestled in foam. She's been locked away in this basement for more than 10 years, waiting patiently to be seen. Emily Fang, NPR News, Damascus, Syria.

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