’ISIL’ Looting Heritage Sites on ’Industrial Scale’

Local Editor

Irina Bokova, the head of the UN cultural agency of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization [UNESCO] warned that "ISIL" were looting ancient sites across Iraq and Syria on an industrial scale and selling on treasures to middlemen to raise cash.

Some sites in Syria had been ransacked so badly they no longer had any value for historians and archaeologists, and UNESCO was also increasingly worried about Libya, the Director General said.

Furthermore, UNESCO's warning came as Syria's antiquities director said "ISIL" destroyed a famous statue of a lion outside the museum in the city of Palmyra, known as Tadmur in Arabic.

Maamoun Abdelkarim said the statue, known as the Lion of Al-Lat, was apparently destroyed last week.

"It's the most serious crime they have committed against Palmyra's heritage," he said.

"ISIL" Takfiri group occupied Palmyra, a renowned UNESCO World Heritage site. So far, the city's most famous sites had been left intact, but several nearby shrines had been blown up.

In London, Bokova told the Royal United Services Institute that the destruction of artefacts "has reached unprecedented levels in contemporary history".

"This deliberate destruction is not only continuing, it is happening on a systematic basis. The looting of archaeological sites and museums, in Iraq particularly, has reached an industrial scale of destruction," she added.

Such "cultural cleansing" was aimed at destroying humanity's common roots, Bokova stated, but was also a source of financing for fighters who she said were charging local farmers to excavate sites and smuggling out artefacts which eventually made their way to private collectors around the world.

""Daesh" ["ISIL"] knows there's a financial upside of this activity and they are trying to gain from it. We know also that parties in the conflict are selling to certain dealers and to private collectors and to market end buyers," the head of the UN cultural agency indicated.

Consequently, Bokova added that satellite images helped UNESCO understand what was going on, she said, but in some areas there were just hundreds of holes in the ground from which artefacts were being extracted and it was difficult to understand what was being looted.

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team