ISIL Looting Heritage Sites on 'Industrial Scale', UN Warns
TEHRAN (Tasnim) - The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) terrorist group is looting ancient sites across Iraq and Syria on an industrial scale and selling on treasures to middlemen to raise cash, Irina Bokova, head of the UN cultural agency UNESCO said.
One fifth of Iraq's about 10,000 official world-renowned sites were under ISIL control and many have been heavily looted, and it was unclear what was happening in "thousands more" areas, Bokova told a meeting of experts in London on Thursday.
Some sites in Syria had been ransacked so badly they no longer had any value for historians and archaeologists, and UNESCO was also increasingly worried about Libya, she said, Al Jazeera reported.
ISIL-controlled territory contains some of the richest archaeological treasures on earth in a region where ancient Assyrian empires built their capitals, Greco-Roman civilization flourished, and Muslim and Christian sects co-existed for centuries.
UNESCO's warning came as Syria's antiquities director said ISIL had destroyed a famous statue of a lion outside the museum in the city of Palmyra, known as Tadmur in Arabic.
Maamoun Abdelkarim said the statue, known as the Lion of Al-Lat, was apparently destroyed last week.
"ISIL members on Saturday destroyed the Lion of al-Lat, which is a unique piece that is three meters tall and weighs 15 tons," Abdelkarim told the AFP news agency.
ISIL captured Palmyra, a renowned UNESCO World Heritage site, from government forces in May.
So far, the city's most famous sites have been left intact, but several nearby shrines have been blown up.
