Syria's wartime antiquities director writes up how 30,000 objects left Deir ez-Zor

The transferable part of this paper is the standard Abdulkarim says he applied, and it was comparative. "My judgment was that the risks of leaving the collection in Deir ez-Zor had become greater than the risks of moving it," he said ^[13]. The trigger came from outside Syria, in the raiding of the Mosul Cultural Museum in Iraq in 2014 ^[5]. "For me, Mosul was a clear warning that waiting for ideal security conditions was no longer possible," he said. "The greater risk could be doing nothing." ^[6]

How much could leave depended on the route. By the summer of 2014, access to the city ran through one very thin, very vulnerable corridor linking part of Deir ez-Zor to a military airport ^[7]. More than 11,000 objects went out that year ^[8]. Against a two-year total of almost 30,000 ^[1], that leaves roughly 19,000 for the 2015 phase, about 63 percent of everything moved ^[17]. Both published figures are rounded, so treat the split as approximate. The larger move followed the destruction of the Temple of Ba'al Shamin, which UNESCO has described as one of the most important religious buildings of its time and place ^[11].

A count of objects does not measure mass, fragility, or how much lift each one needed, and the account is given in objects ^[1]. The totals are the directorate's own ^[18]. Abdulkarim does report one outcome measure cleanly: none of his colleagues were injured across the two missions, and he said the risk to them was the hardest part of the operation for him personally ^[15].

"Digital documentation became a central element of our heritage protection strategy during the war," he said, describing it as a second layer of protection ^[9]. His stated purpose for it is narrow and useful: it "helps establish an object's identity, trace and potentially recover it, and combat theft and illicit trafficking if it is lost" ^[10]. That work began once the crates reached secure storage in Damascus, alongside conservation ^[8].

Staff improvised the packing against limited resources and time pressure, using wooden crates, cotton canvas and reinforced cardboard ^[16]. Abdulkarim, now professor of archaeology and history at the University of Sharjah ^[3], told Discover that the operation was not simply about saving 30,000 objects. He said they were protecting thousands of years of the memory of the Euphrates region, at a time when its communities themselves were suffering enormous human losses because of the war ^[4].