GROUND-BASED OBSERVATIONS OF CULTURAL HERITAGE INCIDENTS IN SYRIA AND IRAQ

Prolonged conflict in Syria and northern Iraq has precipitated the world's most acute humanitarian crisis. Preserving cultural heritage is inextricably linked to resolving this crisis and ensuring the region's future prosperity and stability. The current unrest jeopardizes a vast swathe of cultural patrimony chronicling many millennia of human history covering the origins of the earliest agricultural economies, the rise of the world's first civilizations, the proud achievements of a succession of mighty empires, and the origins of many of the world's major religions. Combat damage, large-scale looting, and politically and ideologically motivated destructions of heritage places and cultural property have emerged as pervasive, daily crimes and atrocities. Terrorist organizations and other factions derive significant revenues through the looting of archaeological sites and museums and the theft of cultural property from their ethnic, religious, and political adversaries and noncombatant minority communities. Extremists brazenly promote radical ideologies through publicized destructions of cultural heritage, and combatants habitually perpetrate cultural property crimes to achieve their short-term objectives. The severe and rapid degradation of cultural infrastructure further raises risks and exacerbates adverse impacts. The deleterious effects on the region's irreplaceable cultural resources and crucial cultural infrastructure threaten to exert manifold, cascading consequences for generations, and the problem is spreading as diverse cultural property crimes have become regular instruments of extremist jihad. What took many millennia to accrue may be erased in but a few years. While conflict resolution and high priority humanitarian needs must constitute the leading edge of international engagement, cultural heritage protection and preservation form integral and durative components of conflict resolution and ensuring stability and wellbeing moving forward. The futures of Syria, Iraq, and neighboring countries hang in the balance, and the destruction of our shared heritage leaves global scars.