By Anne-Marie Carstens*
The practices by which the Islamic State relies on antiquities
trafficking as a profit-making enterprise vary.
In some instances, militants
might engage directly in the armed looting of well-known but under-excavated
archaeological sites. Yet reports
also state that the Islamic State leadership has instituted a system that
requires it to devote far less manpower to the looting of ancient sites. These reports maintain that the
Islamic State has implemented a license-and-tax regime in some regions to
cement its authority and legitimacy, granting licenses to looters in exchange
for a tax on the proceeds from the finds.
The tax, known as a khums tax,
has a basis in Islamic history and traditionally was paid to authorities for profits
derived from the ground.
The United Nations Security Council considered the problem so
severe that last February, it unanimously adopted Resolution
2199, in which it articulated its concern that the Islamic State and other
identified terrorist organizations “are generating income from engaging
directly or indirectly in the looting and smuggling of cultural heritage items
from archaeological sites, museums, libraries, archives, and other sites” in
Syria and Iraq. The resolution therefore
called on the member states of the United Nations to “take appropriate steps to
prevent the trade in Iraqi and Syrian cultural property” as one means of
suppressing the sources of financing for the Islamic State’s terrorist
activities. Satellite imagery and
analysis already had confirmed the vast and devastating scale of looting in
Syria since the Syrian civil war broke out five years ago. The images, which were analyzed as parts of
projects undertaken by the United
Nations Institute for Training and Research, by the American
Association for the Advancement of Science, and by a joint initiative
between the
American Schools of Oriental Research and the United States Department of State,
revealed that the terrain at some of Syria’s most historic and archaeologically
rich sites had become pockmarked by looters’ holes.
Important questions nonetheless remain over quantifying how
much financing Islamic State or other terrorist organizations derive from the
illicit international trade in looted antiquities—and whether current estimates
have been determined by extrapolation or conjecture. At the heart of the debate is the fact that
the illicit trade in looted antiquities from Syria and Iraq depends on looted artifacts
that are largely
unknown in both quantity and quality, and that have been channeled into a
black market that is inherently opaque.
Similarly, although the legal restraints imposed on Syrian and Iraqi
antiquities trafficking have resulted in the
recovery of some looted artifacts, the extent to which these restraints
have dampened the trade or the
prices paid still remains unknown. Moreover,
some looting
has occurred prior to when the Islamic State solidified its strongholds in
northern Iraq and in Syria or in
areas outside the shifting boundaries of those strongholds, making it
unclear how much funding is or has been funneled to the Islamic State itself, as
opposed to other groups and actors that have been circulating throughout the
conflict zones.
In short, the
high prices long paid by collectors for ancient antiquities makes such
artifacts a ripe source of income for terrorist organizations in the region. The value that the Islamic State has derived
from trafficking in looted antiquities therefore is
almost certainly considerable. The
task remains, however, to establish verifiable figures that signify not only
the financial value obtained by the Islamic State to finance its terrorist
activities, but also the loss of our collective cultural heritage.
*Visiting Professor of
Law, Georgetown University Law Center
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