The Manhattan District Attorney's office has returned 36 antiquities to Syria, repatriating objects valued at around $5 million at a ceremony in New York on September 23, 2026. Among the pieces were a stone funerary relief from Palmyra dating to 300 BC and 14 Roman-era mosaics, all brought into the United States by Georges Lotfi, an alleged antiquities trafficker wanted by Interpol and New York authorities. Mohamad Naser Kanatri, the chargé d'affaires of the Syrian embassy in Washington, D.C., accepted the objects on Syria's behalf, saying that "a part of Syria's history is finally returning home." The return marks another step in the repatriation of cultural property looted from the region, with Palmyra — an ancient city devastated by years of conflict — among the sites hardest hit by plunder. The handover is the latest result of a long-running campaign against illicit antiquities by the District Attorney's Antiquities Trafficking Unit, which has pursued the networks moving looted cultural property through the New York art market. Prosecutors allege that traffickers like Lotfi smuggled the works into the country before they entered collections and the trade. On the same day as the ceremony, the office seized 13 further objects from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, bringing the total number of artifacts it has taken from the museum since 2017 to 402 — a measure of how sustained the unit's scrutiny of major institutions has become. The DA's office released a photograph of the Palmyra relief ahead of the handover, one of the most visually striking of the returned pieces.