Crimes against Syrian cultural heritage

The Culture ministry has strongly condemned the attacks of the armed terrorist groups against the Syrian heritage and held the Turkish, Saudi and Qatari regimes as well as the Israeli occupation authorities fully responsible for these crimes.

In a recent statement, the ministry said it is greatly concerned over the armed groups’ terrorist attacks in Idleb province including the looting and destroying of the Syrian antiquities through criminal cooperation between the takfiri terrorists and the Turkish regime of Erdogan.

The ministry added that the terrorism which has been targeting Syria’s history, present and future for the past four years continued to perpetrate more crimes against the Syrian people and their institutions, values, civilization and history. They recently have destroyed the monument (Momentum) of freedom fighter Ibrahim Hanano in the city of Idlib.

It pointed out that these terrorist acts destroy human legacy, calling on the international community and concerned organizations to shoulder their legal and moral responsibility to hold the governments which support terrorism and heritage destruction in Syria accountable for the crimes and to pressure them to halt their assistance to the terrorists.

The ministry pointed out that the attacks on Syrian antiquities and historical sites is an aggression on humanity as a whole, because these sites and antiquities are considered as a qualitative documentation of human experience over different ages.

It called on all concerned international organizations, mainly the United Nations and the Security Council to immediately take deterrent procedures against the terrorists and the governments which support them in accordance with the UN Security Council resolutions 2199 of 2015 which provides for drying terrorism resources and for criminalizing and prohibiting illicit trafficking of the cultural heritage in Syria and Iraq.

Concluding its statement, the ministry stressed determination to uncover the stances of all the countires and parties involved in these crimes and it will adopt all procedures that guarantee the punishment of the criminals and the restoration of the stolen antiquities.

The armed terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq have been playing a heinous role designed to them by regional and international parties aiming to undermine the historic structure and memory of Syria and Iraq through looting antiquities and trade in these countries with the help of smuggling gangs.

The terrorists’ acts of destroying the Syrian and Iraqi cultural heritage, which were described by the UN as “war crimes” serve the interests of the anti Syria and the anti-Iraq parties particularly Israel which wants to eliminate the region’s history in order to justify its existence which has no historical basis.

Rawaa Ghanam