August 7, 2017 | Quoted by Benoit Faucon, Georgi Kantchev and Alistair MacDonald - The Wall Street Journal
The Men Who Trade ISIS Loot
A stream of plundered antiquities flowing out of Syria and Iraq to Western art collectors is dependent on men like Muhammad hajj Al-Hassan.
Mr. Al-Hassan, a 28-year-old Syrian, says he started to trade antiquities in 2015 after being contacted by a top official of Islamic State who sought his archaeological expertise to find Western buyers.
Later, he became a cog in an international supply chain smuggling art looted by ISIS.
ISIS’s territorial grip is fading fast: Iraq has declared victory over the terrorist group in Mosul and ISIS is fighting to hold its self-proclaimed Syrian capital Raqqa—the last major city under its control. But the group’s legacy of looting will linger for many years, law-enforcement officials say, in much the same way that art looted by the Nazis continues to surface 70 years later. The ancient statues, jewelry and artifacts that ISIS has stolen in Syria and Iraq, are already moving underground and may not surface for decades, according to these officials and experts in the trade.
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The illegal trade is “not just for funding the [terrorist] group itself, but for creating ways to bring funds to its subjected population, whose hearts and minds Islamic State is trying to win,” Yaya Fanusie, director of the Washington-based counterterrorism think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told a U.S. congressional hearing last year.
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There are around 20 major art galleries and trading houses in Western European cities that offer smuggled artifacts, the Bulgarian report said, without naming them. “The trade’s main target buyers are, ironically, history enthusiasts and art aficionados in the United States and Europe—representatives of the societies which ISIS has pledged to destroy,” Mr. Fanusie told Congress last April.
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