Syria’s treasure hunting fever

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:06Today, on the trail of Syria's treasure hunters.

0:23So I'm in a section of town in Damascus called Rukkanuddin. It's a quiet residential neighbourhood. And I'm here because, like in many other parts of the city and in the country, metal detector stores have been popping up all around here. A few weeks ago, Will Christou went to investigate a burgeoning new business in free Syria, metal detectors. Before, they weren't allowed during the time of the regime, but now they seem to be all the rage. Under Assad, they were considered a military tool and banned, but not anymore. Inside the store was a bunch of different metal detectors on display. And the name of this machine again?

1:07And how much does it cost? $3 ,700. Wow, that's expensive. It seemed like business was going well. When I was there, there was a steady stream of customers coming in and out. And in general, how is business going? for you.

1:28This was the second branch. There was another one in the north of Syria and they were thinking of opening a third. In its first year of freedom from a dictatorship, Syria is in the grip of a treasure hunting fever. People armed with metal detectors and hopes of getting rich beyond their wildest dreams, trying to find stashes of Assad government loot or Ottoman-era gold. For many people, the treasure they're looking for is not something of legend. It's part of Syria's rich past, antiquities. And most of the customers, what are they looking for exactly?

2:10Syria is one of the most antiquity-rich countries in the world. Civilizations stretch back thousands of years.

2:21and they left artifacts with them. Now there's something of a gold rush in the country. People are digging holes everywhere, looking for buried treasure from the Roman civilization, from the Byzantine civilization, hoping to be able to sell those antiquities on the black market.

2:41Today, why everyday Syrians have turned to robbing ancient graves or scouring the sites of archaeological wonders. And why, unless anything's done about it, some of that stuff could end up in a private collection or museum near you. From The Guardian, I'm Michael Safi. Today in Focus, Syria's booming black market in antiquities and the fight to stop it.

3:11Will Christou, you cover Lebanon and Syria for The Guardian. and a few weeks ago you went on a journey to one of the wonders of the ancient world, a place called Palmyra. Tell me about that trip. So for a few days I had been talking to antiquities officials in Syria who were telling me about this rising problem of antiquities smuggling. And they told me one of the centres where looting was most troubling was in the ancient city of Palmyra. We're on our way to the ancient city of Palmyra. We've been driving for about three hours and we have another 45 minutes to go. Palmyra is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

3:48You've undoubtedly seen the pictures and it's one of the things most associated with Syria. An ancient city with giant Roman columns and ancient statues and ancient busts. We're one of the only ones on this road. It's a sparse desert. And there doesn't seem to be a lot of people traveling this road with us. And we went the long way because of the road that goes straight from Damascus to Palmyra. was mostly deserted, rumored to be surrounded by ISIS sleeper cells. Now all that remains in that area is Islamic State sleeper cells. But for a time, Will, this whole site was actually controlled by ISIS.

4:28What happened to Palmyra during that time? In 2015, ISIS took control of the city. And if you remember from the time, this was when ISIS was really in full swing and had momentum. It was sweeping through Iraq. It was sweeping through Syria, grabbing large swaths of territory. And the Syrian regime seemed to make the decision that abandoning the east to ISIS, the big desert area where Palmyra was located, was the smartest decision strategically. So ISIS took control of the area for a while. And while they were there, they decided that the ancient temples, which Palmyra is so well known for, actually was an affront to Islam.

5:06So they decided to blow up parts of the temple, parts of the ancient Roman victory arch and deface a lot of the statues that were there. And so what does it look like now, now after the end of ISIS and the fall of the Assad regime? So we've just entered the ancient city of Palmyra. Besides the residents of the area around it, no one's there. You know, it used to be a giant international tourist site, and now there's no tourists. The sites that were blown up by ISIS, the temple, the Roman arch, part of the Roman theater, the ruins of the stones still lay there, undisturbed. No one's came in to come and clean it up, nothing like that.

5:50Besides the areas that were blown up by ISIS, there are the remnants of the fighting between the regime and rebels, the regime and the Russians. Muhammad just picked up what looked like a cap on the ground. He said, you see this? I said, yeah. He said, looks like a mine, doesn't it? Thankfully, it was not a mine. I mean, every few feet you walk, there's shrapnel, old grad rockets, pieces of mines and ammunition. So it looks like an area that's been through years and years of war. And when I went there, I met a local archaeologist and resident, Mohamed Al-Faris. And Mohamed had been displaced for more than 10 years.

6:31And the first time that he saw Palmyra again was after the fall of Rashad al-Assad in December.

6:44And he went back and he went straight to the ruins. And he told me that he was shocked by what he saw. It looked completely different from the city he grew up in. But alongside this, like, extensive war damage, you also saw evidence of more recent destruction to the site. That's right. So we've just approached a giant hole in the ground, which Mohammed is telling me was recently dug. I'm climbing in. It was dug by looters. And these are the sites of ancient burial grounds. I'm crouching down now to look inside. Basically, Palmyra is a really large area. It's a huge ancient city. And if you keep going on the outskirts, There's this area that used to be used as a funeral site.

7:33There are mass burial sites and ancient crypts everywhere. And when you go there, the first thing you notice is that it's just littered with holes. Some are small. It looks like someone started digging with a shovel, gave up. Others are really big, stretching down as far as five meters. And these holes are basically dug every night by looters looking for treasure. They're looking to find one of these ancient crypts and to loot some of the treasure that people were buried with. And we're peering into an empty sort of space in the ground that's also been dug out. Looks to be man-made. And Mohammed is telling me that we can't go in the gravesite because it's in danger of collapsing at any moment.

8:22He's saying that the people who loot from this area know well that there's graves here and that's why they come. What kind of treasure, what kinds of things are people looking for in there? You know, it could be something from funerary gold. People who were rich that were buried, they'd be buried with gold and silver, these sorts of things. Or it could just be ancient artifacts. You know, the archaeologist I was with was telling me that the actual stone slate that they would write the epitaph on are worth quite a lot. So anything they can really find, they'll turn around and they'll flip. And these can be quite valuable.

9:00I mean, if you find small silver coins, they can go for hundreds of dollars each. If you find something bigger, like ancient pottery that's still extant or a small ancient statue, these can go for thousands. So this grave site we just saw could contain up to 200 people and was created between the 1st and 3rd century. So about 2 ,000 years old. And it's been looted now. It's impossible to say what they took. But Mohammed was telling me that local looters will steal things from these graves and then put them on Facebook and sell them to the highest bidder.

9:52Amar al-Azam, you're a senior archaeologist and founder of the Athar Project, which monitors the digital market for illegally looted antiquities across the Middle East. Good to have your expertise on the show. During the Syrian civil war, you saw a spike in looted items coming out of Syria. I think to a lot of people, the idea that ISIS was part of this trade would come as a surprise because we might remember them smashing up the big pieces of heritage that they ruled over. But in this case, they were selling the smaller pieces. Tell me more about that. Look, it's important to establish here that they didn't invent looting and trafficking of cultural property.

10:33This was already happening. In fact, looting and trafficking of cultural property has existed for as long as humans have been burying their dead with goodies, people come up after them and they come up. So it's not a new phenomenon. But what they did was they recognized very early on that this is something that they could make use of, that they could exploit. They said, okay, you can continue doing this, but we're going to regulate this. We're going to control this. We're going to start asking you to basically get a permit to do this. A permit to loot these sites? Yes, permit. And so then the next thing they would say to people, OK, and now you have to start paying a tax on the profits from this.

11:12Wow. So it's highly institutional. And that's what they did. And then they industrialized it. This is how we know that they realized and it was profitable for them. They started to get involved themselves. They would hire their own cruiser, bring in their own machinery. They would bring in their own equipment and run the whole process from start to finish. They would move into these areas. They would bulldoze entire mounds. And, you know, within a week, they'd be through the place and out and move on to the next one. So the scale of destruction was just incredible as a result of that. And so how were they selling this stuff?

11:49What kinds of distribution networks existed from ISIS? And then where did the stuff end up? Right. Well, they would have been relying probably on pre-existing networks. Remember, smuggling and looting and trafficking networks have existed for a very, very long time, for decades, if not hundreds of years. So they didn't need to invent that. If you think about by 2015, they were controlling very large swathes of territory between Iraq and Syria. And goods were moving either south through Jordan or north through Turkey. Turkey became a very major route. But the biggest one is Lebanon and Hezbollah.

12:27A lot of stuff was coming through. flow from ISIS-controlled territory and other areas into Hezbollah's channels of smuggling, and then into Lebanon, and then out of Lebanon into Europe. It's worth saying here that Hezbollah and ISIS were on two different sides of the civil war, but it seems like they were able to put those differences aside to make money off of smuggling this stuff. Once ISIS was defeated in 2019, the Assad government retook control of many of those areas. Did they try to crack down on that trade? Not really. Remember, the Assad regime itself has always also been implicated in this kind of trade, especially senior members of that regime and the security members of that regime.

13:14So the looters continued doing what they were doing. They were just now dealing with a new set of masters. Before, you know, it was ISIS. Now came the Russians and the regime. So they were back to dealing with them. Once the Assad government fell last December to the shock of everybody in the world, what did you see happening to this trade? So essentially, what we saw in Syria happening was this incredible increase in looting and trafficking activity after the regime's collapse. So for example, we have around 1 ,513 Facebook, what I would call Facebook looting incidents that we have documented from users based in Syria since 2014 or 2015.

14:05461 of that 1 ,513, that's just about 30%, came after December 8. So 30 % of our looting trafficking posts for Syria occurred after December 8th. That's the shocking part. That's an explosion in this trade. Yes, exactly. And so we need to understand why this is happening. And I'm going to give you three reasons. One is the continued increase in demand from Western Europe and North America, and to a certain extent, the Gulf region as well. But that's still smaller, much, much smaller compared to the two big ones, Western Europe and North America. That's where the main demand for these goods is coming from.

14:52The second one, treasure hunting fever. Remember, every culture, every society I can think of has a treasure hunting sort of element to it. If you think of the United States, it's Civil War gold. If you think of the UK, it's Viking gold or Anglo-Saxon treasure hoards that everybody is looking to find. In Syria, it's Ottoman gold. Everybody knows somebody whose cousin from the third wife, from the fourth uncle, from the sixth niece was digging in their garden or digging in their courtyard and they came upon a pot of gold and they got rich and that's it and they lived happily ever after. So you have to take that into account as well.

15:35And then finally, and that's probably the most critical reason, is the breakdown or absence of rule of law and or incapacity or weak government institutions. You know, the government state institutions that are responsible for the protection and preservation of cultural heritage in Syria were quite weak and debilitated even before the collapse of the regime because of the, you know, the extent of period of the war and et cetera. When the regime collapses, this is followed by, you know, a further breakdown. And we see this right across, you know, not just in this area, but across all other sectors.

16:15And so this has allowed people to go out and continue to do stuff and loot and dig, again, with impunity and without fear of retribution.

16:37So, Will, when Bashar al-Assad fell in December, We all saw footage of Syrians celebrating the overthrow of this dictator after decades of his family's rule. But the end of Assad meant something else for the country too. Tell me about it. You know, when I went over to Damascus from Beirut on the first day that the regime fell, one of the most striking things I saw when I drove in was just lines of military uniforms lining the streets. And these were because overnight, as the regime fell, all of the regime's fearsome security apparatus, the army, intelligence officers, police officers, they all fled, they abandoned their posts.

17:19And so running afoul of these authorities under the Assad regime was something no one wanted. And, you know, to risk your life for a few hundred dollars wasn't something that was worth it. But when the regime fell, all the security forces fled. And all of a sudden, it was an open season. You know, in Syria, given its rich history, you throw a stone, you'll hit an archaeological site. And so people mired in poverty began to dig in their backyards to find whatever they could and sell it on the open market. I mean, you know, a key part of the story is people selling their antiquities on Facebook.

17:54And I remember one of the striking captions I saw was a man holding a handful of ancient silver coins. And he said, I've been holding these for 15 years, free Syria, and listed them for sale. I mean, that really says something about the desperation in the country at the moment the regime fell. That's right. You know, Syria is a country that has left this 14-year civil war deeply in poverty. The UN estimates that over 90 % of Syria's population lives under the poverty line. And so most of the people that you see who are engaged in looting are doing it just to make ends meet. And here I think of one guy I knew.

18:34He, when I first met him in Syria, was a high-ranking civil servant. And he lost his job in the months after the fall of the regime. And then in March, he fled to Lebanon. And as he did, he was texting me. And one day he sent me a picture, right after he'd gotten to Lebanon, of what looked like an ancient manuscript, beautifully illuminated. And he was flipping through it. He had told me he had found this. Didn't tell me where. But somewhere near his home. and he wanted to know if I knew anyone who'd be interested in buying it for any amount of money because he just needed the cash desperately.

19:10And I think the story is the same for many Syrians. You know, the prospect of digging and hitting a small cash, whether it be a few, you know, a handful of coins or a small ancient statue and that bringing you thousands of dollars overnight. I mean, that is something that could change a life there. It's the stuff of fairy tales. It really is. And, you know, sometimes you'll hear things that really do sound like fairy tales. And so what is the government? What are other groups in Syria trying to do to get control of this? I mean, they're trying. They're trying. So first, Luna, if you could just introduce yourself.

19:51So I met a woman named Luna Rajab. I'm architect and I have specialization in a master degree in restoration of historical monuments. And she's just started working with the new Ministry of Culture to protect heritage sites. And she told me one of the initiatives that the government is trying to do to protect heritage sites and to incentivize people to turn in things they find rather than sell them is offering a small finder's fee. Just today, for example, a family came to meet with the Ministry of Culture. they had found a big floor of mosaic that goes back to the Byzantine era. The person that found it, he was actually contracted by one of these organized groups to find and remove the mosaic.

20:42He said that somebody offered them$2 million. When he saw it, he was overcome with guilt and said, I can't take this away from the country. So he went to the Ministry of Culture. There's no compensation for$2 million. I was going to say, does he get a medal or what? And he told them about the mosaic. And they didn't give him$2 million, but they gave him something and some recognition of what he's done. They did give them a small amount of money. It's a small, in parallel, in comparison with the$2 million. But at least he's not a thief. You know, he's not stealing the history of his country. Coming up, why the answer to curbing this looting spree in Syria might lie in places like London?

21:43Hamid, I'm interested when you say that so much of this stuff ends up being taken from sites across Syria to the West. And I'm curious, where is it sold once it reaches Europe or other Western countries? I mean, you're feeding into a well-established international trade in antiquities. Remember, there is a legitimate trade, okay, in Western Europe and North America. It exists. There are auction houses, there are dealers, and many of them are all reputable. You know, they work within the legal norms, etc. And then on the other side of that, there is the illicit trade, the illegal trade. And the two should be as far apart from each other as possible, because one is legal, one is illegal.

22:32The problem is that there is this massive gray zone in between. And it's this gray zone that makes this so complicated. So when you start to have a lot of looted material illicitly acquired and looted from sites like those in Syria that start to bleed into this gray zone, this gray area, if you will. And then from there, enter the market as if they are legally acquired. That's when you have major problems. And museums end up buying them, private collectors and dealers end up buying them. And sometimes they know that these are illegally acquired and illicitly trafficked, but also sometimes they don't.

23:15And we have to, you know, accept that this happens. And so who is that on the demand side? Is it people like these big auction houses that sell a lot of this stuff? Like how careful are they about where these objects have come from and how they've made it to places like the UK? Technically, they should be very careful. They should be very vigilant. They should do due diligence. There are well-established rules and systems for how to do this. The problem is, do they enforce them? How well do they enforce them? Are they consistent in how they enforce them? And, you know, some auction houses do and some auction houses don't.

23:53Some dealers do, some dealers don't. Welcome, everybody. This is a very special day for the Manhattan District Attorney's Office. A good example would be the Metropolitan Museum in New York when they bought that gold sarcophagus, which turned out to be looted. Now, this coffin was actually buried in Egypt for more than 2000 years until it was looted from Egypt in 2011. From there, in 2011, the coffin was illegally transported to a warehouse in Dubai and subsequently shipped to Germany for restoration and then went to France for sale. It finally arrived here in New York in 2017, where it was sold to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for approximately$4 million by a French dealer.

24:35And that caused a lot of embarrassment to the Metropolitan Museum. They had to give it back. And there are many other cases like that. I mean, you have spent your career trying to preserve this priceless heritage of Syria and the world. What do you think the Syrian government could be doing in this moment to try to stifle this theft of its heritage on a grand scale? Right. That's a fair question, but also an unfair question. This is what we get asked all the time. What can the Syrian government do? The side that basically just went through the most horrific humanitarian catastrophe, war, conflict you can think of, and we're asking them to do more.