The same goes for that crucible. A squaddie from Long Island in a hurry in a night time raid could have thought the primitive shape of a pot he found on a shelf or in a cupboard meant it might be old. Abu Sayyaf may have got it from one of the factories as a sample of the sort of thing they needed more of and he was going to procure as connected with the group's finances (the factory could for example have been processing seized jewellery and other items as bullion). We have absolutely zero proof that Abu Sayyaf or anyone else was trying to sell it as "an antiquity dug up in Syria/Iraq" .
I suggested the plaques might be fakes, and Sam Hardy suggests the bracelets might be. Who knows? At least they look more like antiquities.
What I think has happened is that a team of US (and Iraqi?) intelligence officers has been sitting down and working through the material brought back from the Al-Amr raid, sorting through it. This would involve preliminary cataloguing and recording (photography and archiving of the evidence). This is what we see recorded on the labels of the bags of antiquities. The Intelligence team were separating out the categories of material. They ended up with a boxload of "things", rather than the documents they need for their main task. They had a boxload of "things" they themselves were not competent to deal with (none of them were archaeologists - nor did they need to be). They therefore passed it on to the experts. It seems they felt that the expertise that would be able to sort out what is what is found in the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad, which is where they sent this batch of material, flying it over (or round) ISIL territory. Apparently it will be the Iraqi museum staff who will inform the army what the material could mean, and determine what should happen to it.
This would explain several of the anomalies of this group.
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