Turkey major conduit for Syrian 'blood antiquities'

Arzan Karasu, "Turkish
dealers hoarding
antiquities"

Turkey is a major transit country used by Islamic State for trafficking looted antiquities, but authorities have not been forthcoming about their seizures (Pinar Tremblay "Turkey major conduit for Syrian 'blood antiquities'" Al-Monitor Sep 25, 2015).

Turkey, with its long and porous border and intense refugee traffic, is an ideal transit country for looted antiquities and other smuggled goods. Turkish authorities have reportedly confiscated hundreds of smuggled objects, particularly in cities close to the border. Hediye Levent has been reporting from Syria since 2008 and during that time interviewed Maamoun Abdulkarim of the Directorate General of Antiquities of Syria. Levent shared Abdulkarim’s burning question: “Why would the Turkish government not reveal the list of Syrian antiquities it has captured?”

Government corruption is of course an important element in countries like these:

Eyup Sabri Tinas, an attorney from the border city of Urfa, told Al-Monitor, “Smuggling cannot be completely prevented, but the reason it is so pervasive in Turkey is that those who carry out these activities have political connections as well as arrangements with the authorities in charge of monitoring them. Not everyone is corrupt of course, but there are hard-to-break, deep-rooted networks. For instance, the same drugs confiscated by one agency in Diyarbakir are seized again a couple of months later by the same agency’s Istanbul branch. They were supposed to have been destroyed, but they somehow made their way back onto the black market.

Turkey’s role as a transit country in the illicit antiquities trade is changing as buyers become diversified and transnational criminal networks expand their reach. The Turkish government’s lack of transparency makes the situation even worse. It seems though that the "evidence" against collectors is pretty thin:

Arzum Karasu, a journalist preparing a documentary on the issue, told Al-Monitor, “Although there are quite a few unverified reports that several pieces of Syrian antiquities have been sold on the black market, when experts investigated, they discovered that most of them were replicas.” Terrill and other scholars agree that the most precious pieces are kept off the market by [Turkish] dealers and are not expected to resurface for a decade. Most dealers see these purchases as long-term investments.

Erdogan's Turkey pursues an aggressive retentionist policy towards it's own antiquities, but apparently sees no problem in making money out of somebody else's.