In August of 2015, art dealer Mohamad Yassin Alcharihi hired an importer to transport a mosaic from Turkey to his house in Palmdale. He sent the broker an image of the piece and described it as stones glued on polyester fabric, worth $391.
The photo he sent showed a modern mosaic depicting a fish pond. Alcharihi neglected to mention that the actual item he wanted to import was not this contemporary piece of public art, nor the arts-and-craft project he described, but a looted Syrian antiquity he hoped to sell to the Getty for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Alcharihi was eventually arrested on one count of entry of falsely classified goods and was found guilty by a jury in June of this year. He faces a maximum sentence of just two years, but the harm of this crime is far more profound.
“There’s a bigger problem with the Syrian material that’s been being looted out of that country, and that is that some of the finances are used for terrorism. And that’s the same thing that happened with the Taliban and Al Qaeda,” said Robert Wittman, the former senior investigator of the FBI’s rapid deployment Art Crime Team. “So that’s where [the antiquities trade] enters the realm of international terrorist crime.”
Despite the international significance of art crimes like Alcharihi’s, they rarely capture the attention of American news media. Unfortunately, this general disinterest discounts the fact that the Syrian antiquity trade threatens national security by funding what are, according to the Institute for Economics and Peace, the deadliest terrorist groups in the world.
The real mosaic Alcharihi imported — which US government investigators say was hidden behind dozens of vases in a metal shipping container — is roughly 2,000 years old. It depicts the moment that the ancient hero Hercules rescued the trickster Prometheus from a liver-eating eagle. It was likely looted from Idlib, Syria, a city that has been ravaged by conflict between President Bashar al-Assad’s government forces, resistance fighters and the Islamic State for well over a decade. It was also purchased just months after the United Nations Security Council adopted a resolution condemning the destruction of cultural heritage in Syria by terrorist organizations, according to a U.S. attorney’s office press release.
Alcharihi emailed the Getty about selling the mosaic after having it valued by an antiquity dealer at $100,000 to $200,000; a government appraisal expert later valued it at $450,000. When federal agents searched Alcharihi’s home in March of 2016, he admitted that he had lied about the object’s financial and cultural significance, saying it was “not [the broker’s] business to know the details,” according to court documents.
A 2019 study attempting to quantify the value of lost Syrian antiquities found that from just two sites of the over 5,000 under their control, the Islamic State looted an estimated $20 million worth of the country’s cultural heritage. Those further down the supply chain aren’t innocent either; A 2023 report on terrorist financing in the art market found that art dealers like Alcharihi who knowingly participate in the laundering of “blood antiquities” are complicit in terrorist activity, and some are a willing part of the organizations’ schemes.
Because these crimes rarely involve average citizens and few take the time to elucidate the seemingly abstract connection between the art trade and global conflict, the perpetrators largely evade public scrutiny. This allows them to fly under the radar, and the crimes to continue.
Dr. Rami Alafandi, a Syrian native and expert in Middle Eastern art and architecture, says that because of the volume of lost artifacts, it’s difficult to determine which group to blame for stealing an individual object like the Hercules and Prometheus mosaic. This becomes even more muddied by the Syrian government working alongside ISIS.
While this looting practice funds terrorism and Bashar al-Assad’s totalitarian regime, Alafandi says that some Syrians experience a disconnect from their culture that prevents them from caring about the lost art.
“With identity and culture and how people understand their culture, sometimes they don’t feel connected to the culture because of how it’s presented to them. So they don’t care. They want the money. They don’t care about [The government and ISIS] selling the artifacts,” he said.
Dr. Lydia Harrington is the senior curator of the Virtual Syria Museum, a project aiming to “fill the obvious gap” in the public record of Syrian cultural heritage. She says that a similar disconnect between American and Syrian culture results in a lack of conservation efforts on the US’s end.
“[America’s] attention span is unfortunately pretty short, in forgetting Syria. And followed by the Muslim ban from Donald Trump, you know, it’s just a total rejection of Syria,” Harrington said. “A lot of people in the country don’t think Syria’s important or don’t trust Syrians, even though Syria holds so much of what we consider Western culture, things that I think a lot of Americans feel are the history of democracy.”
Syria is roughly 90% Muslim, according to Harvard’s Divinity School. While anti-Muslim sentiment isn’t uncommon in post-9/11 America, former President Trump’s travel ban on seven majority-Muslim countries, including Syria, reignited and condoned American Islamophobia. According to Hussam Ayloush, chief executive officer of the California chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, anti-Muslim hate crimes occurred on a “much greater in scope than we saw after 9/11″ following Trump’s policies and comments on Islam.
Between Islamophobia stifling American conservation efforts and the chaos of war, incredible amounts of Syrian cultural heritage have been destroyed over the last decade. The lack of coverage that news media affords this issue has further contributed to the international ignorance of this loss of history.
This dilemma is not unique to Syria, either. Fine art and antiquities aren’t often protected or highlighted in the media because, for most, there are seemingly bigger problems.
“There’s a whole broad spectrum of people who are really into their culture, to people who don’t care because it’s subsistence living. They’re concerned with where their next meal’s coming from. If you’re a person on the streets, you don’t care about your culture,” said John Pollini, archaeologist and professor of art history at USC.
The FBI’s Art Crime Team, which investigated Alcharihi’s case, recently expanded to two dozen agents and regularly uploads press releases about stolen art and artifacts. According to Special Agents Elizabeth Rivas and Allan Grove, this recent expansion is due to both an increase in thefts during the pandemic and a growing interest in the atypical nature of the cases. However, this intrigue remains contained to relatively niche audiences, relegating stories like that of the Hercules mosaic to the back burner despite their direct connection to the funding of global terrorists and the loss of humanity’s heritage.
“It’s a shame because the fact is that it’s heritage crime. It steals the heritage of nations and cultures and boils it down to just the dollar value rather than the archeological, scientific and social value,” Wittman said. “But that’s not what laws are made for.”
This story is a part of the Justice Reporting Project, created through a journalism class by student journalists in the Annenberg Media Center, with the goal of broadening traditional crime reporting. Edited by Professors Lauren Lee White and Alan Mittelstaedt.