Syrian troops accused of looting Palmyra after ISIS expulsion

Hermann Parzinger, president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, has accused off-duty Syrian soldiers of conducting illegal excavations and looting the UNESCO World Heritage site of Palmyra. Speaking to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Parzinger stated that the recapture of Palmyra from ISIS in March 2016 was an important victory for culture, but that Bashar al-Assad and his supporters are not saviors of cultural heritage. He noted that Assad's soldiers have looted the ruins even before ISIS's presence and that their bombs have indiscriminately hit columns and ancient walls for minimal military advantage. The allegations were raised during a two-day conference in Berlin involving 170 scientists, archaeologists, and architects convened to study solutions for protecting war-devastated Syrian heritage sites. Since 2015, investigative archaeologist Mark Altaweel has been mapping the presence of artifacts from Syrian areas among London antiquities dealers, discovering items from Palmyra and Nimrud. The looting reportedly resumed immediately after the last clashes in March, with the site moving from one threat to another.