Senior members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee this week called on the Treasury Department to impose sanctions on importers of antiquities smuggled from Syria.
The lawmakers said those involved in trading the goods are helping to finance the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
{mosads}“By adopting these restrictions, the United States would close our markets to the trafficking in historical artifacts that helps fund the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the barbaric terrorist group that continues to occupy large swaths of Syria and Iraq,” panel Chairman Ed Royce (R-Calif.) and ranking member Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) wrote in a March 30 letter to Adam Szubin, acting undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence.
Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J), chairman of the committee’s Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations subpanel, and Rep. Bill Keating (Mass.), the top Democrat on the Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade subpanel, joined Royce and Engel in the letter.
“To date, our efforts to eliminate ISIL’s sources of funding have focused primarily on preventing oil smuggling and denying ransoms demanded for kidnapping,” they wrote. However, a “comprehensive effort must also cover looting and trafficking of cultural property, which has become a significant source of funding for ISIL and other terrorist organizations.”
The missive comes a week after the same group introduced legislation aimed at stopping the destruction of cultural heritage in war zones occupied by ISIS and establishing a position at the State Department to handle efforts between agencies to prevent the destruction of cultural property abroad.
The foursome noted that the United Nations Security Council in February unanimously adopted a resolution that urges all members to prohibit trade in cultural property looted from Syria.
The resolution warned that ISIS and other terror groups “are generating income from engaging directly or indirectly in the looting and smuggling of cultural heritage items from archaeological sites, museums, libraries, archives, and other sites in Iraq and Syria, which is being used to support their recruitment efforts and strengthen their operational capability to organize and carry out terrorist attacks.”
The U.S. “should act quickly to impose the restrictions on trade in cultural property called for in this resolution,” lawmakers told Szubin.