Iran shows willingness to restore monuments in Syria
QAMISHLI, Syria (North Press) – Iran has showed its willingness to help in restoring archaeological monuments in Syria, amid reports of looting Syrian antiquities by Iranian-backed factions.
On October 2, the official Syrian government news agency SANA reported that the Syrian Minister of Economy and Foreign Trade, Muhammad Samer al-Khalil, discussed cooperation and coordination in economic and investment fields with the Iranian Deputy Minister of Tourism, Ali Asghar Shalabvian, in the Syrian pavilion at the Expo Dubai 2020.
The Iranian side expressed its readiness to “actively participate in the reconstruction and restoration of the archaeological and tourist monuments that were vandalized in Syria.”
He also showed his country’s willingness to invest in tourism through building and equipping “new hotel.”
Reports stated that archaeological sites in Syria are under threat due to their use by Iranian-backed factions as warehouses to store weapons.
The factions store weapons and missiles they brought from Iraq in several archaeological places in the eastern Syrian desert, especially in the ancient castle of al-Rahba in the vicinity of the city of al-Mayadin in the eastern countryside of Deir ez-Zor, according to reports.
Local reports state that the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) have recently extracted large quantities of antiquities from the city of Palmyra in the Syrian desert, where the militias are utilizing three Iraqi archaeologists, local excavation workers and medium machinery in excavations.
The General Directorate of Antiquities and Museums of the Syrian government has documented 710 archaeological sites and buildings that have been vandalized, and the damages ranged from partial vandalism, to extinction or complete demolition, as in Tel Miqdad al-Kabir in Daraa and the Umayyad Mosque in Aleppo.
The number of archaeological sites in Syria exceeds 4,500, containing about forty human civilizations, from Ebla, Ugarit and Mari, Aramaic, Phoenician, Akkadian, Chaldean, Byzantine, Roman and Arab.
Earlier, the UNESCO listed six Syrian archaeological sites on the World Heritage List, namely the old neighborhoods of Damascus, ancient Aleppo, which is the oldest currently inhabited city in the world, Citadel of al-Madiq, Citadel of al-Hosn, the ancient city of Bosra, the city of Palmyra, and the ancient villages in north and northwest Syria.