Iraq's top antiquities officials said Tuesday that the destruction of ancient artifacts by Daesh (ISIS) shown in videos spread online was a cover for the group's looting operations, AP reported.
Videos released online in April showed the militants taking sledge hammers to the antiquities and blowing up 3,000-year-old temples in Nimrud. But Qais Hussain Rashid, head of Iraq's State Board of Antiquities, told AP he thinks the destruction hid the extremists' plans to take the artifacts as profit.
"We think that they first started digging around these areas to get the artifacts, then they started demolishing them as a cover up," Rashid said.
Nimrud was one of the greatest cultural discoveries in Iraqi history, according to AP, where a royal tomb contained gold jewelry that officials worry were taken by Daesh. Experts said the larger items in Nimrud may have been destroyed for the cameras, but the smaller artifacts and valuable objects were stolen and sold for revenue.
Daesh has been profiting off of trafficking cultural antiquities in both Iraq and Syria. A UN resolution meant to choke off Daesh's funding banned countries from trading any antiquities from Syria.
Iraq's antiquities have been a target for extremists before, in 2003 when al-Qaeda looted the country's archeological sites to fund its activities.
