As Syria attempts to get back on its feet after a bloody civil war and a decades-long brutal dictatorship, thieves break into the National Museum of Damascus and walk away with six valuable Roman-era statues.Staff at the museum, the largest in Syria, became aware of the theft on Monday morning, November 10, when they saw that the door to the classical department had been broken, the Associated Press reported. Syrian authorities said an investigation is underway. The heist comes after cultural heritage looting surged after the escape of the country’s former dictator, Bashar al-Assad, last December. The museum closed for six years after the civil war broke out in 2011. It was briefly closed again in January following the fall of the al-Assad regime. According to AFP, gold ingots of unspecified origin were also taken in the early morning heist.The museum houses a collection of antiquities, including prehistoric, Byzantine, and Islamic art, spanning 11,000 years of Syrian history.Adnan Almohamad, an honorary research fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London, who studies archaeological heritage looting in Syria, speculated in an email to Hyperallergic that the theft could have been an inside job.“It appears that the operation was carried out by individuals with good knowledge of the Damascus Museum and the vulnerabilities that Syrian museums have faced for many years,” Almohamad wrote.The Syrian Directorate-General for Antiquities and Museums hasn’t yet responded to Hyperallergic’s inquiries.Almohamad drew similarities between this week’s heist and what he said was another theft of 13 items from another national museum in the city of Deir ez-Zor in eastern Syria in 2010. In that case, Almohamad said, a museum staff member was revealed to be the culprit. That museum, according to reports at the time, was evacuated by regime forces as the Islamic State consolidated power.“On the positive side, the stolen items came from the exhibition hall, where objects are well documented, which reduces the risk of illicit sale,” Almohamad said. “If they had been taken from storage areas, which house hundreds of thousands of items from various Syrian museums in largely unorganized conditions due to space limitations, the situation would have been far worse, making identification and recovery extremely difficult.”