Inside the multimillion-dollar illegal trade in artefacts from the Middle East

 Inside the multimillion-dollar illegal trade in artefacts from the Middle East UAE-based The National investigates "what is being done to prevent the illegal trade of artefacts in the Middle East" (here: Yemen, Iraq, Egypt) "and return them to their nation of origin" (article by Nada El Sawy, Sinan Mahmoud, Mina Aldroubi).

Hmm. The image at the top is from a Welayat Nineveh video of April 2015, showing ISIL activists destroying reliefs in the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud in northern Iraq rather than anything directly concerning the antiquities trade. The whole article is confused and confusing and has a markedly dated look, as if it was cobbled together from a sheath of mixed papers found overlooked in a drawer in the editorial office. It was composed just recently (reference to Alaa Hassanein sentencing as "last month"), so it serves to show how little headway we have actually been making with this problem in the public sphere over the last decade or so. And all the time, the emphasis is on "repatriation" of loose decontextualised objects, rather than on fighting the destruction of evidence getting them onto the market causes.