Smuggler of Stolen Artifacts From Palmyra Speaks Out About ISIS’ Illicit Operation

April 6, 2016

A man with a long black scarf wrapped tightly around his face sat down in an apartment in southern Turkey and placed a plastic shopping bag on a table. He reached inside to reveal a 20-inch-tall relief.

The sculpture, he said, was the last in a series of artifacts he had been selling in the country on behalf of ISIS.

“They destroy those large statues for the cameras,” said the 38-year-old man, who asked only to be identified as Abu Mustafa, referring to the propaganda videos of ISIS fighters smashing larger, life-sized sculptures with hammers in the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra.

“They’re too big to move, anyway,” he said, before turning his attention to the smaller prize in the plastic bag: the relief of an ancient sun god. “What they are really interested are these.”

Inside this apartment in a Turkish town near the Syrian border, the ISIS smuggler spoke in detail about the lucrative antiquities trade in which he has been involved. Even as Syrian government forces celebrated the recapture of Palmyra, a UNESCO world heritage site, from ISIS last month, the terror network was busy selling off cultural treasures looted from one of the centers of the ancient world.

NBC News showed pictures of Abu Mustafa’s artifact to several leading experts, and while none of them could verify the object’s authenticity from a photo, most of them agreed that it most likely comes from Palmyra and dates back to the first or second century A.D.

A similar artifact from the Palmyra museum, used as a reference by some of the scholars, is said to have been unearthed in the renowned Valley of Tombs.

Newly declassified satellite images included in a report released on Monday by the State Department-funded ASOR Syrian Cultural Heritage Initiative reveal the extent of the damage to the archaeological site during the 10-month-long ISIS occupation of Palmyra.

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