The collapse of a once-feared security apparatus, coupled with widespread poverty, has triggered a gold rush in Syria where experts say social media has emerged as a key hub for the sale of stolen antiquities.
Located in the heart of the fertile crescent where settled civilization first emerged, Syria is awash with mosaics, statues and artifacts that fetch top dollar from collectors in the west and the site of looting since 2012, The Guardian reported on Sunday.
According to the Antiquities Trafficking and Heritage Anthropology Research Project (ATHAR), which investigates antiquities black markets online, nearly a third of the 1,500 Syrian cases it has documented since 2012 have occurred since December alone.
It said that much of the looting is being carried out by individuals desperate for cash, hoping to find ancient coins or antiquities they can sell quickly.
In Damascus, shops selling metal detectors have proliferated while ads on social media show users discovering hidden treasure with models such as the XTREM Hunter, which retails for just over $2,000.
They come by night. Armed with pickaxes, shovels and jackhammers, looters disturb the dead. Under the cover of darkness, men exhume graves buried more than 2,000 years ago in Syria’s ancient city of Palmyra, searching for treasure.
“These different layers are important, when people mix them together, it will be impossible for archaeologists to understand what they’re looking at,” said Mohammed al-Fares, a resident of Palmyra and an activist with the NGO Heritage for Peace, as he stood in the remains of an ancient crypt exhumed by looters.
By day, the destruction caused by grave robbers is apparent. Three-meter-deep holes mar the landscape of Palmyra, where ancient burial crypts lure people with the promise of funerary gold and ancient artifacts that fetch thousands of dollars.
Al-Fares picked up a shattered piece of pottery that tomb raiders had left behind and placed it next to the rusted tailfin of a mortar bomb.
Palmyra, which dates back to the third century BC, suffered heavy damage during the period of ISIS control, when militants blew up parts of the ancient site in 2015, deeming its ruins apostate idols.
Palmyra is not the only ancient site under threat. Experts and officials say the looting and trafficking of Syria’s antiquities has surged to unprecedented levels since the opposition overthrew former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in December, putting the country’s heritage further at risk.
“When the [Assad] regime fell, we saw a huge spike on the ground. It was a complete breakdown of any constraints that might have existed in the regime periods that controlled looting,” said Amr al-Azm, a professor of Middle East history and anthropology at Shawnee State University in Ohio and co-director of the ATHAR project.
For her part, Katie Paul, a co-director of the ATHAR project and the director of Tech Transparency Project, said: “The last three to four months has been the biggest flood of antiquities trafficking I have ever seen, from any country, ever.”
“This is the fastest we’ve ever seen artifacts being sold. Before for example, a mosaic being sold out of Raqqa took a year. Now, mosaics are being sold in two weeks,” said Paul.
Paul, along with Azm, tracks the route of trafficked Middle Eastern antiquities online and has created a database of more than 26,000 screenshots, videos and pictures documenting trafficked antiquities dating back to 2012.
The report said that Syria’s new government has urged looters to stop, offering finder’s fees to those who turn in antiquities rather than sell them, and threatening offenders with up to 15 years in prison.
But preoccupied with rebuilding a shattered country and struggling to assert control, Damascus has few resources to protect its archaeological heritage.
In 2020, Facebook banned the sale of historical antiquities on its platform and said it would remove any related content. However, according to Paul, the policy is rarely enforced despite continued sales on the platform being well documented.
“Trafficking of cultural property during conflict is a crime, here you have Facebook acting as a vehicle for the crime. Facebook knows this is an issue,” said Paul.
She added that she was tracking dozens of antiquities trading groups on Facebook that have more than 100,000 members, the largest of which has approximately 900,000 members.
A representative from Meta, the parent company of Facebook, declined to respond to the Guardian’s request for a comment.
The Facebook groups are used as a gateway for traffickers, connecting low-level looters in Syria to criminal networks that smuggle the artifacts out of the country into neighboring Jordan and Türkiye.
From there, the pieces are shipped around the world to create fake bills of sale and provenance so they can be laundered into the grey market of antiquities.
After 10 to 15 years they make their way into legal auction houses, where collectors and museums, primarily located in the US and Europe, snap them up.
