Laurent Levi-Strauss, chief of cultural objects and museums section at UNESCO, said it was immensely difficult to determine where looted antiquities were going.
"The market is totally secret, so we don't know where they are," he said. "We don't know who is buying them or where the money is going."
Smuggling Tax
Bogdanos said the complex routes for the trade in plundered antiquities appear to have generated an underground tariff system.
"According to my sources, (Lebanese) Hezbollah is now taxing antiquities," he told the AP.
Bogdanos said the antiquities trade was not an immediate source of revenue for insurgents after the U.S.-led invasion.
"They were not that sophisticated," he said, adding that it was not until late 2004 "that we saw the use of antiquities in funding initially the Sunnis and al-Qaida in Iraq, and now the Shiite militias."
Although security has improved dramatically in Iraq in recent months, it is all but impossible for Iraq's 1,500 archaeological guards to protect the country's more than 12,000 archaeological sites, experts said.
"Unauthorized excavations are proliferating throughout the world, especially in conflict zones," Francoise Riviere, the assistant director-general of UNESCO's cultural branch, said at the conference.
Bahaa Mayah, an adviser to Iraq's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities who attended the conference in Athens, says looters sometimes use heavy machinery to dig up artifacts—and destroy the site while they loot.
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Associated Press writers Jamey Keaten in Paris, Verena Dobnik in New York and Bradley Klapper in Geneva contributed to this report.
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