Hoe IS illegal kunst vernietigt en verhandelt om de strijd te financieren

Not ISIL loot, but cultural
racketeering all the same

Ben van Raaij and Nell Westerlaken have published a (Dutch-language) discussion of looting and destruction in the Islamic State,  'Hoe IS illegal kunst vernietigt en verhandelt om de strijd te financieren', quoting Sam Hardy, who has produced a summary for us of the main issues. Basically the message that comes through is that in general, reporting on this and associated issues is a mess. A symptom is the recent misquoting of Bokova's version of how much the illicit trade is worth by most sources, the rubbish about antiquities looting being 'the second biggest'; source of ISIL revenue. There are those who want to stress that there is no evidence of any artefact smuggling at all, but that antiquities trading is invisible does not mean, as Hardy points out, that it is in fact non-existent. Above all severe problems are caused by the fact that journalists - for whatever reason - want to sensationalise the stories by focussing  on the ISIL-looting and ignore what they are being told about other groups being involved too and that focus obviously produces more discussion in the media regarding the Islamic State than the Assad regime or the opposition coalition (see Sam's text for more details on that).

In particular Sam discusses the issues we both have with this "taxation" story (he is quoted as being quite rude about it in the interview!). There are a number of discrepancies and puzzling issues once you start to go into the details of how it might work on the ground.  There are concerns that there may be some restriction and fabrication of evidence by Syrian opposition groups:

Much false evidence of destruction [of monuments he means - PMB] has been spread by (genuinely) victimised communities. Otherwise, I find it difficult to explain how we have so much more information about the functioning of the antiquities trade in Islamic State territory than we do about it in regime and rebel territory, and how we have so much more information about the functioning of the antiquities trade in IS-controlled Syria than we do about it in IS-controlled Iraq. And, even thinking in terms of Islamic States rather than Islamic State, I find it difficult to explain how we have so much contradictory information – not from distant speculation, but from multiple in-depth investigations, by large networks, across wide social and geographical ranges. 

It seems the Dutch newspaper could not get hold of some decent photos of real Roman coins.... There is a lot of it about.