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Irina Bokova

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) are looting ancient sites across Iraq and Syria on an industrial scale and selling on treasures to middlemen to raise cash, Irina Bokova, the head of the UN cultural agency Unesco, has said.

One fifth of Iraq’s about 10,000 official world-renowned sites were under ISIL control and many have been heavily looted, and it was unclear what was happening in “thousands more” areas, Bokova told a meeting of experts in London on Thursday.

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, she said.

ISIL-controlled territory contains some of the richest archaeological treasures on earth in a region where ancient Assyrian empires built their capitals, Graeco-Roman civilisation flourished, and Muslim and Christian sects co-existed for centuries.

UNESCO’s warning came as Syria’s antiquities director said ISIL had destroyed a famous statue of a lion outside the museum in the city of Palmyra, known as Tadmur in Arabic. This deliberate destruction is not only continuing, it is happening on a systematic basis.

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

“ISIL members on Saturday destroyed the Lion of al-Lat, which is a unique piece that’s three metres tall and weighs 15 tonnes,” Abdelkarim said.

“It’s the most serious crime they have committed against Palmyra’s heritage,” he said. The limestone statue, discovered at the temple of Al-Lat, a pre-Islamic Arabian goddess, dated back to the 1st century BC.

ISIL captured Palmyra, a renowned UNESCO World Heritage site, from government forces in May.

So far, the city’s most famous sites have been left intact, but several nearby shrines have been blown up.

Also on Thursday, the group released photos showing its members in Aleppo destroying several statues from Palmyra that were being smuggled through the northern province. “An ISIL checkpoint in Wilyat (region of) Aleppo arrested a person transporting several statues from Palmyra,” the group said.

“The guilty party was taken to an Islamic court in the town of Minbej, where it was decided that the trafficker would be punished and the statues destroyed.” — AFP