JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
During Syria's civil war, the country's archaeologists risked and sometimes lost their lives in an effort to save tens of thousands of ancient relics across the country from war. But as NPR's Emily Feng reports, since the end of that war more than a year and a half ago, cultural heritage experts are warning that Syria's antiquities are facing new dangers.
EMILY FENG, BYLINE: In times of old, the Syrian town of Maarat al-Numan was famed for its colored stone, which went into its breathtaking Byzantine era mosaics. Before the war, visitors from the world over came to see them. But by 2012 came serious civil war, and Maarat al-Numan in northwest Syria became a battleground between rebels and government soldiers.
ABDEL HAY KADDOUR: They did not care - no museum, no culture. They...
FENG: This is Abdel Hay Kaddour, a guide who used to take tourists to visit the mosaics regularly before the war. He points to where a large floor mosaic once was, now trampled by tanks.
KADDOUR: They have tanks here. They have the army. They can broke (ph). They can - they did anything.
FENG: Majd Mazloum, one of the museum's caretakers, says local residents tried to protect the surviving mosaics afterwards...
MAJD MAZLOUM: (Speaking Arabic).
FENG: ...By removing them, wrapping them in mesh and hiding them. But now that the war is over, these mosaics in Syria's enormous store of ancient treasures are at risk from something else.
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FENG: From looting - drive across the Syrian countryside outside the ancient cities of Damascus and Aleppo, and you will see fresh holes, mostly dug by hand by Syrians who are treasure hunting.
(SOUNDBITE OF STICK THUMPING)
KADDOUR: Yeah.
FENG: Kaddour demonstrates how looting happens. We're now on the grounds of Serjilla, a city built in the fifth century but abandoned more than 1,200 years ago. And as we walk through the stone ruins, he pauses every few seconds to tap the earth with a wooden stick.
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FENG: He says for looters, that hollow sound means there could be an empty space underneath, perhaps containing pottery or gold. And soon we come across some haphazardly dug holes.
Here's one right in front of me now, pretty shallow. They must have dug just a few days ago. It looks like they found a jar, broke it open and took whatever was inside.
Heritage experts are worried about this looting.
AMR AL-AZM: I mean, looting, unfortunately, has exploded since the fall of the regime.
FENG: This is Amr Al-Azm. He is a Syrian archaeology professor at Shawnee State University in Ohio and a longtime advisor to Syria's museums and antiquities agency.
AL-AZM: Looking at essentially Facebook and other social media.
FENG: Before arriving in Syria, he showed me public social media groups with hundreds, sometimes thousands of members, featuring artifacts touted as Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman. These groups have posted more looted Syrian origin antiquities for sale in the last year than any year during the civil war. That's according to the Antiquities Trafficking and Heritage Anthropology Research Project, or ATHAR, a group Azm is part of that's tracking antiquities trafficking. In Syria, Azm says everyone essentially lives on top of an archaeological site, so looting is an easy way to make money...
AL-AZM: The deterioration in the economic situation.
FENG: ...When the economy stalled since the war ended, and there is little enforcement of long-standing anti-looting laws.
AL-AZM: Still fairly, you know, fragile security conditions.
FENG: As the new government struggles to assert control over the country. Ayman Mustafa Nabo (ph), deputy director at Syria's museums and antiquities agency, said in response to an NPR request for comment that the country is making progress in controlling looting. Looting had skyrocketed immediately after the Assad regime collapsed, but Nabo said there's been a, quote, "gradual but substantial decline" in looting during the second year of the new government, largely because state security forces are working with the interior ministry to crack down. Azm disagrees that things are getting better, but he says Syrian authorities are doing what they can with limited resources. He argues cultural preservation is central to helping Syrians heal from a civil war that pitted communities against one another and ruptured society along multiple lines.
AL-AZM: Social, economic, sectarian, ethnic - when so much has happened to us, the only shared common denominator I see today is our shared common history, our shared past.
FENG: But even antiquities in Syria's museums are at risk of theft and degradation from moisture and heat. This includes the tens of thousands of statues, cuneiform tablets and other priceless antiquities saved during the war, an effort in part organized by Maamoun Abdulkarim.
MAAMOUN ABDULKARIM: In 2012, we preserved all the object in the ground in the warehouses.
FENG: Abdulkarim was Syria's director general of antiquities and museums in Damascus during the first half of the civil war. He spearheaded an ambitious operation to ferry every museum's cache of ancient objects to the capital for safe storage.
ABDULKARIM: Despite the wars of our land, we transported 24,000 object to Damascus; Homs, 15,000; Hama museum, 5,000.
FENG: And here in Damascus, all of those items remain in storage until the day Syria's museums are restored and their treasures can be safely displayed once again.
AL-AZM: Just come here (ph).
FENG: But that day is likely years off.
AL-AZM: These all have objects which are stored in them.
FENG: Azm recently gave me a tour of the subterranean depths under Damascus' National Museum. A lack of money to fix it means much of the museum remains closed to the public.
There are these green army ammunition cases stacked up along the sides of the hallway. But inside, it's not ammunition. It's artifacts.
Artifacts - some of the three truckloads of statues, reliefs and mosaics from the ancient city of Palmyra, evacuated by Abdulkarim the night before the extremist group ISIS captured the city for the first time in 2015. That same year, ISIS executed one of Abdulkarim 's colleagues, a prominent archaeologist named Khaled al-Asaad because he refused to tell the militants where they had hidden Palmyra's antiquities.
AL-AZM: Palmyra - this one that's open here (ph).
FENG: We lift the wooden lid of one of the ammunition boxes.
Wow, there's just...
AL-AZM: Yeah, just the stone (ph)...
FENG: ...Stone pillars?
AL-AZM: Stone - no, it's a stone relief.
FENG: Stone relief inside.
AL-AZM: Carving, yeah, of a face of a woman.
FENG: It's a funerary statue, taken from a Palmyran tomb built nearly 2,000 years ago. The likeness of this long-dead woman, bejeweled and in a headdress, looks up at us, nestled in foam. She's been locked away in this basement for more than 10 years waiting patiently to be seen. Emily Feng, NPR News, Damascus, Syria.
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