Protected From Looting, Damascus Museum Reopens A Month After Assad’s Fall
Damascus:
Syrians returned on Wednesday to the nationwide museum in Damascus, reopened for the primary time since Islamist-led forces seized the capital and ousted president Bashar al-Assad.
The antiquities museum closed its doorways on December 7, a day earlier than Damascus was taken by insurgent forces, over fears of looting.
“We firmly shut the museum’s iron doorways after we noticed the scenario was unstable,” mentioned Mohamed Nair Awad, head of the nationwide antiquities authority.
Within the early hours of December 8, after Assad had fled and as rebels approached the capital, many troopers and law enforcement officials from the forces of the deposed president’s authorities give up their posts.
With checkpoints unmanned and no safety personnel exterior public establishments, looters had been in a position to enter the central financial institution, a number of authorities ministries and different buildings.
Awad mentioned his group instantly reached out to the brand new authorities, led by Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.
“They despatched us a bunch of fighters to guard the museum,” and it survived unscathed, he mentioned.
On Wednesday, members of the general public walked across the constructing and admired its assortment.
Archeology pupil Shahanda al-Baroudi, 29, was giving a good friend overseas a tour of the museum through video name.
“When the regime fell, I remembered scenes from the Baghdad museum after the autumn of Saddam Hussein and feared I would not see the artefacts once more,” she mentioned.
“I cried after I got here again and found it had not been broken.”
The Baghdad museum’s assortment was decimated by looters within the chaos that adopted the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.
Outdoors the Damascus museum, Iyad Ghanem was amongst a bunch holding up indicators demanding the brand new rulers assist protect the nation’s cultural heritage.
Some artefacts on the museum date again greater than 10,000 years, he mentioned.
The museum’s huge assortment consists of tens of hundreds of items, starting from prehistoric blades and Greco-Roman sculptures to Islamic artwork.
The museum was closed for six years throughout Syria’s civil warfare, which broke out in 2011 with the brutal repression of anti-Assad protests, to guard its treasured artefacts from violence or looting.
It reopened in 2018, after Assad clawed again management of huge swathes of the nation.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV workers and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
