Damascus museum reopens a month after the fall of Bashar al-Assad

The Syrians were able to return, Wednesday January 8, 2025, to the Damascus museum, for the first time in a month. It was closed shortly before the Islamist rebels came to power. While the rebels led a lightning offensive from the north of the country towards Damascus, the museum of antiquities was closed on December 7, the day before the capture of the capital, for fear of looting. « We had closed the iron doors of the museum when we noticed that the situation was becoming unstable »explained Mohamed Nair Awad, director of antiquities in the country.

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In the early hours of December 8, the day President Bashar al-Assad fled, many soldiers and police officers left their posts. taking advantage of the absence of security forces in front of public institutions, looters were able to enter the Central Bank, several ministries and other public establishments.

Nair Awad, the director of antiquities, said his team immediately contacted the new Islamist-led authorities of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). « They sent us a group of fighters to protect the museum »and it remained intact, he added.

When it reopened on Wednesday, Chahanda al-Baroudi, a 29-year-old archeology student, showed the museum to a friend living abroad via a video call on her phone. « When the regime fell, I thought back to the scenes in the Baghdad museum after the fall of Saddam Hussein and feared I would never see the antiquities again », she said. « I cried with joy to discover that it had not been damaged here. ». The Baghdad museum was ransacked by looters in the chaos following the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

In front of the Damascus museum, Iyad Ghanem holds up signs with other people to ask the new power to protect the country’s heritage. Some pieces in the museum date back more than 10,000 years, he recalls. The museum’s vast collection includes tens of thousands of pieces, ranging from prehistoric tools to Greco-Roman sculptures to Islamic art.

The museum was closed a year after the start of the Syrian civil war, triggered by the bloody repression of anti-Assad protests in 2011, to protect its pieces. It reopened in 2018 after the reconquest of large parts of the country by forces loyal to President Assad.