A Picture Worth a Thousand Dinar

If you take the 2 or 3 train from Chambers Street to 14th Street, transfer to the M train, and ride 20 minutes to Rockefeller Center, you’ll find yourself at the largest art distribution center in the world: Christie’s Auction House. It was here where the only Leonardo da Vinci painting available for sale was bought for a whopping $450 million. It was also where the most valuable private collection of art—that of Peggy and David Rockefeller—was sold at an auction for over $835 million. As one of the five global auction houses responsible for over half of the world’s art sales (a market currently valued at over $67.4 billion), Christie’s remains accessible (and affordable) to only the wealthiest and most ambitious art collectors.

Yet obtaining seemingly rare and priceless artworks could also be as easy as placing an order on Amazon. In fact, you can purchase a wide variety of valuable antiques and artifacts on Amazon, eBay, Facebook, or WhatsApp with a simple click of your mouse. You might not even have to do any browsing at all; sellers may randomly message you offering to sell you rare, long-lost artifacts at outrageously low prices. Several art collectors told The Wall Street Journal two years ago that they received Facebook messages from strangers offering them gold Roman coins, funerary figurines, and even an ancient tomb—all for sale at suspiciously low cost.

The suspicion wasn’t unwarranted. After some investigation, United States Intelligence officials discovered the art’s true origins—and no, these products were not counterfeits or forgeries. The low-cost antiques often found online are in fact illegally excavated or stolen artifacts, sourced from dig sites all around the world.

Satellite images of historical cities and landmarks in the Middle East have revealed a shocking discovery: thousands of illegal excavations in Syria and Iraq, visible as pockmarks among some of the world’s most important ancient ruins like Mari and Dura-Europos in Syria. About 1,000 miles away in eastern Bulgaria, a police raid of four homes uncovered a gold mine of looted antiquities: 19 classical statues and fragments of marble or limestone, including a square tablet possibly dating back nearly 5,000 years. After extensive analysis of the artifacts, archaeologists and various experts managed to trace the art back to the Islamic State militant group, better known as ISIS.

When the Islamic State was at the height of its power in 2014, the terror organization began the systematic destruction and excavation of various historical sites in Iraq and Syria to amass revenue for the caliphate. Islamic State militants robbed Iraq’s Mosul Museum, stealing antiquities up to 8,000 years old. They even detonated bombs in temples in Palmyra, an ancient trading outpost in Syria, and destroyed the ancient Iraqi city of Hatra, a trading center on the Silk Road during Roman times.

Interestingly, the group’s persistent destruction of art seemed to contradict their goals, which were initially understood to be exclusively financial. Turns out, the Islamic State’s interest in art wasn’t only for revenue. The New York Times reported in 2016 that the historical objects and sites the Islamic State destroyed were heresy to the group’s radical fundamentalist ideology, which is rooted in Wahhabism. In Palmyra, for example, where IS militants blew up two historic tombs—one of a Shiite saint and another of a Sufi scholar—those responsible claimed it was because of the two figures’ status as heretical idols. The Islamic State released videos in March of 2015 showing militants shooting at and bulldozing the historical sites of Hatra and Nimrud in Iraq. The footage went viral, allowing the group to dramatically enhance their public outreach and, by extension, boost recruitment.

Though ISIS later fell from power by December of 2017, experts still urge against releasing a sigh of relief. Indeed, the fall of the group left a huge power vacuum in the territories it once held. Governmental security is still largely absent in the region, and instability ravages the land ISIS once occupied. Under these circumstances, the reality is that countless ISIS affiliates (like Al Qaede in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP) have the potential to coalesce into a threat far greater and capable than ISIS was at the height of their power, and the art trade that ISIS left behind is a treasure trove of revenue that any of the groups may easily access.

The persistent expansion of the illicit art trade has by no means gone unnoticed, but combatting it has been far from fruitful. Mainstream e-commerce sites like Amazon and eBay have explicit policies against selling stolen assets, yet detecting illegal sales activities largely depends on reports by buyers who often don’t have enough knowledge to identify seller legitimacy in the first place. This is compounded with a lack of accountability inherent in online selling platforms; The Wall Street Journal estimates that upwards of 80 percent of antiquities for sale online have no legal documentation whatsoever. Further, catching smugglers at international borders or retrieving stolen art that has already been sold is even more difficult: international law regarding art is weak and often contradictory. The United States and other countries do not have explicit jurisdiction over artifact sales from Syria. On top of that, customs can screen only a portion of what crosses international borders, and in countries like Germany, privacy laws protect both buyers and sellers from suspicion. Finding little success, few countries have shown interest in fighting the illicit trade.

Right now, the United States is one of these reluctant bystanders. But we haven’t always been that way—nor should we continue to be. In 1943, General Dwight D. Eisenhower facilitated the birth of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program, which dedicated American military protection to cultural artifacts across the world; ever since the program was dissolved in 1946 and its functions were undertaken by the State Department, protecting art in foreign countries is hardly on the government’s agenda. Indeed, even though the State Department’s diplomatic corps has capable Foreign Service Officers at every overseas mission assigned to liaise with leading cultural institutions and ministries, and despite the fact that it retains the international authority to broker agreements with countries to protect cultural artifacts, the State Department has rarely acted to secure, protect, and categorize valuable foreign artifacts in decades.

The market for art has grown exponentially since the 1960s both in our auction houses and in our black markets. While art flourishes in markets both on and off the books, the United States has yet to undertake the mission of protecting international art, even as threats to the integrity of the global art trade continue to expand in scale and number.