Syrians returned to the National Museum of Damascus on Wednesday, which reopened for the first time since Islamist-led forces captured the capital and ousted President Bashar al-Assad.
The antiquities museum closed its doors on December 7, a day before rebel forces captured Damascus, due to fears of looting.
“When we saw that the situation was unstable we closed the doors of the museum firmly,” said Mohammad Nair Awad, head of the National Antiquities Authority.
In the early hours of 8 December, as Assad fled and rebels approached the capital, many soldiers and police officers from the ousted president’s government abandoned their posts.
With unmanned checkpoints and no security personnel outside public institutions, looters were able to enter the central bank, several government ministries, and other buildings.
Awad said his team immediately reached out to the new authorities, led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.
“They sent us a group of fighters to protect the museum,” and it escaped unharmed, he said.
On Wednesday, members of the public walked around the building to admire its collection.
Shahanda al-Baroudi, a 29-year-old archeology student, was giving a tour of the museum to a friend abroad via video call.
“When the regime fell, I remembered the scenes in the Baghdad Museum after the fall of Saddam Hussein and I was afraid I would never see the artifacts again,” she said.
“When I came back and found it wasn’t damaged I cried.”
The Baghdad Museum’s collection was destroyed by looters in the chaos that followed the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.
Outside the Damascus Museum, Iyad Ghanem was among a group carrying placards demanding that the new rulers help preserve the country’s cultural heritage.
Some of the artefacts in the museum are more than 10,000 years old, he said.
The museum’s vast collection includes thousands of pieces, from prehistoric blades and Greco-Roman sculptures to Islamic art.
The museum was closed for six years during the Syrian civil war, which began with the brutal repression of anti-Assad protests in 2011, to protect its valuable artifacts from violence or looting.
It reopened in 2018, after Assad took back control of large parts of the country.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
