UNESCO general director, Irina Bokova warned on Wednesday of collective looting of Syrian antiquities by Islamic State (IS) terrorist organization stressing on the need to combat the smuggling of masterpieces used to finance IS militants, al-Bawaba News reported. Behind the Royal United Services Institute in London, Bokova announced that satellite images showed the flow of artifacts to illegal market as evidence of widespread looting operations, stressing that the fight against the smuggling operations has become the most important priority for UNESCO. Earlier last August, Bokova revealed that five archaeological sites out of 10 thousand official sites fell for IS and were looted significantly. For Syria, Bokova affirmed that a number of archaeological sites have been looted to the extent that they are no longer of archaeological or historical value adding that the deliberate destruction that currently witnessed in Iraq and Syria had reached unprecedented levels in the contemporary history. Bokova considered that such a "cultural cleansing" aims to destroy the common roots of humanity in addition to being means of funding IS militias.
