Spotting a rare foreigner in the southern Syrian city of Nawa, Khalil approaches with a business proposal: bring him a “very good metal detector from abroad” with “very good sonar” and he promises “very good results ... pure gold coins”. He grins.
The white-haired 62-year-old is wearing sunglasses and a Nike-branded black bomber jacket, a cigarette hanging between his fingers. He is a veteran gold digger who has been searching for 40 years.
“I once was lucky,” he recalls wistfully.
A decade ago, Khalil – who is only being identified by his first name – says he discovered 840 silver coins in a sealed jar. He believes they were from the Abbasid period, which lasted from about 750 to 1258 AD. This booty fetched Khalil $50,000 (€43,000), money he says he shared with others working for him.
He pauses, considering his previous proposal. He is also looking for foreign traders: people who could transport any discoveries abroad and sell them for a good price. Here is another way we could enter business together, Khalil suggests.
Syria is in the midst of a gold rush. While gold-digging – where people search for coins and other old, buried artefacts – took place under the Assad regime, the opening up of movement and something of a security vacuum across the country has turbocharged it.
As omnipresent regime checkpoints and the all-seeing tentacles of intelligence branches were shut down, more Syrians have taken to digging for gold, motivated by a catastrophic economic situation that leaves people with few other options.
“Everybody is digging now. Children. Women,” says one gold digger, who, like many others, declines to be named.
But this looting of artefacts is raising widespread concerns. While it is deemed illegal by the new government, these rules are taking time to be implemented or respected. The Syrian Civil Defence, commonly known as the White Helmets, may be better known for life-saving work during the war, but now they have been drafted in to map heritage sites across Syria over the next two years.
They are fundraising for help with efforts including surveying and assessing damage; removing explosives and mines from historic sites; and installing protective infrastructure.
Syria has a rich history, including six Unesco-recognised World Heritage Sites, all of which Unesco says were destroyed or badly damaged during nearly 14 years of civil war. “By helping us safeguard these sites, you’re helping Syrians reclaim their cultural roots and rebuild what war has tried to erase,” the White Helmets appeal says.
On the ground in the southern Daraa governorate, any idea of safeguarding seems far away.
Dotted across a hill that a local historian says used to be a Roman, Byzantine and Greek village, men search for gold from 7am to 5pm, six days a week. They cover their faces in scarves to protect their skin from the scorching sun, stopping occasionally for tea breaks, the water poured out from a jerrycan. At night, they hide their equipment in holes under stones so they are not spotted walking with it through urban areas.
I lost 13 colleagues because the Syrian regime used to shoot on us
A metal detector costs $4,000, and can detect buried items up to one metre below the surface, they say. Pieces of seemingly ancient pottery litter the ground around them.
One 23-year-old says he has been searching for gold since he was a child, making a discovery “sometimes every day, every two days, every month”. He did it “even under the regime ... I lost 13 colleagues because the Syrian regime used to shoot on us”. Regime forces would claim they were terrorists digging tunnels, he says.
“It’s like a hope,” says another man, behind him, who explains that they form “workshops”: five members in their workshop operate together, pooling anything they find.
“I never found gold, I only found small coins,” says a third searcher, who still earns an occasional $100. His dream is to discover a jar of gold.
A short walk away, another set of apparent gold diggers are going to more extreme measures, using a €45,000 mechanical digger to lift up huge chunks of earth. Though a metal detector and shovel lie close by, when asked what they are doing, one responds that they are “fixing” something. Another deflects, beginning to talk about how many nearby historical sites the Assad regime destroyed instead.
Though gold diggers are easy to find in this part of Syria, they try to maintain secrecy around the specifics of their work. Those who set off in the morning, with a shovel and pickaxe, may drive in the wrong direction to confuse anyone observing them, before turning back to enter their chosen site for the day.
Someone who gets lucky will be reluctant to disclose to anyone, except for a trader, what they have found. “If I find 10 gold coins and tell my neighbours, the same night they will come and rob my house,” one local said.
This is a lesser risk than what came before: military intelligence would detain and “disappear” searchers, a gold digger said. This was despite the regime itself being accused of selling antiquities to raise money. Opposition forces, during the lengthy war, also reportedly sold artefacts to buy weapons.
They call it ‘shaghlat yali malah shaghle’ – the job of the jobless
The gold diggers open tombs and crypts, sometimes finding skeletons still wearing jewellery, bracelets, rings and a necklace, with a kohl applicator nearby. “When a young girl died they buried her with all her jewellery,” one man says. Chambers underground can be booby-trapped, with a stone or spear falling down when they are opened. One superstition is that the graves are monitored by demons, and if you want to enter you have to slay an animal and drop its blood at the entrance. Weapons have also been discovered in graves.
A man describes finding eight small statues made from malachite. He sold them for $12,000 in 2011 to a businessman near Damascus. They later turned out to be worth $100,000. This is a common theme: Syrians feel they are being ripped off by traders with access to foreign markets.
They call it “shaghlat yali malah shaghle” – the job of the jobless, says Abu Khaled (56), who describes himself as an “expert” and agrees to be identified only by his nickname. “This is the only way the people can get money. There is opportunity now.”
The main issue is “the metal detectors aren’t very advanced”. He says stones in Daraa can contain metal oxides because it’s a volcanic area, confusing the machines. Other people just use a shovel and pickaxe to search.
Abu Khaled used to own a factory, but it closed down because of the difficulties of transporting goods through regime checkpoints. His hobby is “archaeology and archaeological sites ... I like to preserve history. I feel sad if someone writes on the wall of an ancient building, for example”.
He partly educates himself through YouTube videos and Facebook pages, though many of the opinions shared online are wrong, he says.
In his livingroom, he displays what he called “samples”: coins he found himself – dozens in total. They would fetch about $150 inside Syria, but up to $3,000 outside, he says. He believes they came from the Islamic period, Roman period and Byzantine period.
“Of course, taking artefacts out of the country is not good for the heritage of the country, but we have to go back to the source of the problem ... The Syrian regime bombed the towns here with barrel bombs, fighter jets ... Daraa is full of artefacts ... We cannot blame one or two poor people,” he says.
He says Syrians from Daraa used to travel to Lebanon or Jordan to find employment, but Lebanon has suffered a devastating financial crisis and a residency is required to work in Jordan now. Local agricultural work has been decimated by drought related to climate change. “So people were stuck here” and needed to find something to do. If someone gets lucky they will “go to Mars”, Abu Khaled says, using a phrase that means getting very rich.
“In an ideal world” the new government would “protect the sites” and encourage tourism, but to do that the government would also need to improve the country’s infrastructure. Daraa could be an unlikely destination for tourists, too, not least because it is regularly affected by Israeli incursions and attacks.
But the apparent loss of history is being mourned by some. “I feel like I’m suffocating,” says history and archaeology researcher Nadal Muhammad Saed Sharaf (62) about the feeling he experiences looking at the photographs of historical sites and artefacts spread out on the floor in front of him.
There are dozens including an Aramaic water spring, a “temple of sun” from the Greek period, a stone cross from the early Christian period, Roman roads, Byzantine stones and an “ark of victory memorial of battle” between a Roman and Persian army.
Sharaf took these photographs in 2002. When he was displaced from Nawa for three years during the war, he buried the pictures in his back garden, digging them up again upon his return. Some 90 per cent of the actual sites are destroyed now, he says. It causes him “grieving, pain”.
Poverty is not a justification to do this stuff because this is our identity and we have to preserve our history
Daraa, Sharaf says, was a very important historical trade route throughout “all the history of mankind”, set – as it is – between Baghdad, Amman, Beirut and Damascus. It was inhabited as far back as 10,000 BC. In 2006, he accompanied visiting European archaeologists when they came to study this area, but in the years since, he says, those seeking to preserve its history have not received support or funding.
“The Syrian regime destroyed all archeological sites with aerial bombings and later with bulldozers because they didn’t want the rebels to hide in them,” he says.
Now Sharaf would like to see a collaboration between the new government and Unesco to protect what remains and to restore what they can.
“There’s extreme poverty here and the state doesn’t have a grip on the ground, so the poor people are going to search [for gold and artefacts],” he says.
But “poverty is not a justification to do this stuff because this is our identity and we have to preserve our identity and history”.
Additional reporting by Hani Alagbar and Nader Debo
