Report that Antiquities Sales is Major ISIS Funding Source Disputed by Authorities

Joseph Coplin, co-owner of New York antiquities dealer Antiquarium on behalf of the American Council for the Preservation of Cultural Property, and James McAndrew, the former head of the Department of Homeland Security’s International Art and Antiquity Theft Investigations Program [made] a joint statement, “There is a great deal of incorrect information being disseminated by the media, generally groundless numbers generated by special interest groups that are parroted by the media without the benefit of fact-checking. Conceiving and implementing military or legal agenda based on bad data is dangerous.” [...] Coplin and McAndrew told Homeland Security Today that, “Grantham’s article provides absolutely no evidence that objects purportedly looted by ISIS have been sold to art collectors --that is because there is no evidence available. There have been no seizures of such material at US ports of entry, or by European customs. There have been no pieces removed from auctions, art fairs or dealers’ galleries that were proven to originate from the current crisis, despite the hundreds of thousands of legal and transparent transactions of antiquities that occur every year in the art market.”

“This is not, as Grantham suggests, because Western powers are turning a blind eye to such material; in fact, it is exactly the opposite,” Coplin and McAndrew said. “There have been intense efforts: legislative, law enforcement, diplomatic, social media, etc., to stop the influx of looted material from ISIS. It’s just that none of it has turned up outside of the region. Another issue that needs to be stated is that the Western antiquity market is already saturated with this type of material from the over the 100 years previous to ISIS when these common objects were freely traded. Anyone who collects this type of thing can find it in the legitimate market place in the West. Ancient Near Eastern is not a particularly popular collecting interest in the current market, partly because it is so heavily scrutinized, even though the material is relatively common.”

Anthony Kimery, 'Report that Antiquities Sales is Major ISIS Funding Source Disputed by Authorities' Homeland Security Today, Jan 7 2017.