ISIS isn't just destroying history's greatest treasures — it's selling them on the black market

Looted works are smuggled across the Iraq border into Turkey and other surrounding states, and end up in the hands of unscrupulous dealers and collectors in Europe and the Persian Gulf, who shop by photograph or over videochat. Authorities in Lebanon and Turkey have already seized hundreds of antiquities looted from Syria, but many more are making their way to market undetected. Experts have spotted pieces fresh from the ground for sale for tens of thousands of dollars in London galleries.Some antiquities are smuggled and sold directly by the Islamic State, with profits going into their central coffers. But the group has also figured out how to profit from the trade without doing any of the work of stealing. Impoverished Syrian and Iraqi civilians have pockmarked archeological sites with pits in search of antiquities. The Islamic State keeps watch over their work and collects a 20 percent "tax" on the value of whatever these diggers find. According to the Syrian Heritage Initiative of the American Schools of Oriental Research at Boston University, the so-called caliphate sometimes grants its fighters the right to collect this tax as part of their salary. In turn, the fighters give a portion of the money they collect to their central command. [Bloomberg]