World - Reuters
Looters Ransack Baghdad's Antiquities Museum

Sat Apr 12, 6:59 PM ET
By Hassan Hafidh

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Looters have sacked Baghdad's antiquities museum, plundering treasures dating back thousands of years to the dawn of civilization in Mesopotamia, museum staff said on Saturday.
They blamed U.S. troops for not protecting the treasures.
Surveying the littered glass wreckage of display cases and pottery shards at the Iraqi National Museum on Saturday, deputy director Nabhal Amin wept and told Reuters: "They have looted or destroyed 170,000 items of antiquity dating back thousands of years...They were worth billions of dollars."
She blamed U.S. troops, who have controlled Baghdad since the collapse of President Saddam Hussein's rule on Wednesday, for failing to heed appeals from museum staff to protect it from looters who moved in to the building on Friday.
"The Americans were supposed to protect the museum. If they had just one tank and two soldiers nothing like this would have happened," she said. "I hold the American troops responsible for what happened to this museum."
The looters broke into rooms that were built like bank vaults with huge steel doors. The museum grounds were full of smashed doors, windows and littered with office paperwork and books.
"We know people are hungry but what are they going to do with these antiquities," said Muhsen Kadhim, a museum guard for the last 30 years but who said he was overwhelmed by the number of looters.
"As soon as I saw the American troops near the museum, I asked them to protect it but the second day looters came and robbed or destroyed all the antiquities," he said.
ARMED GUARDS
Amin told four of the museum guards to carry guns and protect what remained.
Some of the museum's artifacts had been moved into storage to avoid a repeat of damage to other antiquities during the 1991 Gulf War.
It houses items from ancient Babylon and Nineveh, Sumerian statues, Assyrian reliefs and 5,000-year-old tablets bearing some of the earliest known writing. There are also gold and silver helmets and cups from the Ur cemetery.
The museum was only opened to the public in April 2000 after shutting down at the beginning of the 1991 Gulf War. It survived air strikes on Baghdad in 1991 and again was almost unscathed by attacks on the capital by U.S.-led forces.
Iraq, a cradle of civilization long before the empires of Egypt, Greece or Rome, was home to dynasties that created agriculture and writing and built the cities of Nineveh, Nimrud and Babylon -- site of Nebuchadnezzar's Hanging Gardens.

A civilisation torn to pieces

Robert Fisk
13 April 2003
They lie across the floor in tens of thousands of pieces, the priceless antiquities of Iraq's history. The looters had gone from shelf to shelf, systematically pulling down the statues and pots and amphorae of the Assyrians and the Babylonians, the Sumerians, the Medes, the Persians and the Greeks and hurling them on to the concrete.
Our feet crunched on the wreckage of 5,000-year-old marble plinths and stone statuary and pots that had endured every siege of Baghdad, every invasion of Iraq throughout history - only to be destroyed when America came to "liberate" the city. The Iraqis did it. They did it to their own history, physically destroying the evidence of their own nation's thousands of years of civilisation.
Not since the Taliban embarked on their orgy of destruction against the Buddhas of Bamiyan and the statues in the museum of Kabul - perhaps not since the Second World War or earlier - have so many archaeological treasures been wantonly and systematically smashed to pieces.
"This is what our own people did to their history," the man in the grey gown said as we flicked our torches yesterday across the piles of once perfect Sumerian pots and Greek statues, now headless, armless, in the storeroom of Iraq's National Archaeological Museum. "We need the American soldiers to guard what we have left. We need the Americans here. We need policemen." But all that the museum guard, Abdul-Setar Abdul-Jaber, experienced yesterday was gun battles between looters and local residents, the bullets hissing over our heads outside the museum and skittering up the walls of neighbouring apartment blocks. "Look at this," he said, picking up a massive hunk of pottery, its delicate patterns and beautifully decorated lips coming to a sudden end where the jar - perhaps 2ft high in its original form - had been smashed into four pieces. "This was Assyrian." The Assyrians ruled almost 2,000 years before Christ.
And what were the Americans doing as the new rulers of Baghdad? Why, yesterday morning they were recruiting Saddam Hussein's hated former policemen to restore law and order on their behalf. The last army to do anything like this was Mountbatten's force in South-east Asia, which employed the defeated Japanese army to control the streets of Saigon - with their bayonets fixed - after the recapture of Indo-China in 1945.
A queue of respectably dressed Baghdad ex-cops formed a queue outside the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad after they heard a radio broadcast calling for them to resume their "duties" on the streets. In the late afternoon, at least eight former and very portly senior police officers, all wearing green uniforms - the same colour as the uniforms of the Iraqi Baath party - turned up to offer their services to the Americans, accompanied by a US Marine. But there was no sign that any of them would be sent down to the Museum of Antiquity.
But "liberation" has already turned into occupation. Faced by a crowd of angry Iraqis in Firdos Square demanding a new Iraqi government "for our protection and security and peace", US Marines, who should have been providing that protection, stood shoulder to shoulder facing them, guns at the ready. The reality, which the Americans - and, of course, Mr Rumsfeld - fail to understand is that under Saddam Hussein, the poor and deprived were
always the Shia Muslims, the middle classes always the Sunnis, just as Saddam himself was a Sunni. So it is the Sunnis who are now suffering plunder at the hands of the Shia.
And so the gun-fighting that broke out yesterday between property owners and looters was, in effect, a conflict between Sunni and Shia Muslims. By failing to end this violence - by stoking ethnic hatred through their inactivity - the Americans are now provoking a civil war in Baghdad.
Yesterday evening, I drove through the city for more than an hour. Hundreds of streets are now barricaded off with breeze blocks, burnt cars and tree trunks, watched over by armed men who are ready to kill strangers who threaten their homes or shops. Which is just how the civil war began in Beirut in 1975.
A few US Marine patrols did dare to venture into the suburbs yesterday - positioning themselves next to hospitals which had already been looted - but fires burnt across the city at dusk for the third consecutive day. The municipality building was blazing away last night, and on the horizon other great fires were sending columns of smoke miles high into the air.
Too little, too late. Yesterday, a group of chemical engineers and water purification workers turned up at the US Marine headquarters, pleading for protection so they could return to their jobs. Electrical supply workers came along, too. But Baghdad is already a city at war with itself, at the mercy of gunmen and thieves.
There is no electricity in Baghdad - as there is no water and no law and no order - and so we stumbled in the darkness of the museum basement, tripping over toppled statues and stumbling into broken winged bulls. When I shone my torch over one far shelf, I drew in my breath. Every pot and jar - "3,500 BC" it said on one shelf corner - had been bashed to pieces.
Why? How could they do this? Why, when the city was already burning, when anarchy had been let loose - and less than three months after US archaeologists and Pentagon officials met to discuss the country's treasures and put the Baghdad Archaeological Museum on a military data-base - did the Americans allow the mobs to destroy the priceless heritage of ancient Mesopotamia? And all this happened while US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, was sneering at the press for claiming that anarchy had broken out in Baghdad.
For well over 200 years, Western and local archaeologists have gathered up the remnants of this centre of early civilisation from palaces, ziggurats and 3,000-year-old graves. Their tens of thousands of handwritten card index files - often in English and in graceful 19th-century handwriting - now lie strewn amid the broken statuary. I picked up a tiny shard. "Late 2nd century, no. 1680" was written in pencil on the inside.
To reach the storeroom, the mobs had broken through massive steel doors, entering from a back courtyard and heaving statues and treasures to cars and trucks.
The looters had left only a few hours before I arrived and no one - not even the museum guard in the grey gown - had any idea how much they had taken. A glass case that had once held 40,000-year-old stone and flint objects had been smashed open. It lay empty. No one knows what happened to the Assyrian reliefs from the royal palace of Khorsabad, nor the 5,000-year-old seals nor the 4,500-year-old gold leaf earrings once buried with Sumerian princesses. It will take decades to sort through what they have left, the broken stone torsos, the tomb treasures, the bits of jewellery glinting amid the piles of smashed pots.
The mobs who came here - Shia Muslims, for the most part, from the hovels of Saddam City - probably had no idea of the value of the pots or statues. Their destruction appears to have been the result of ignorance as much as fury. In the vast museum library, only a few books - mostly mid-19th-century archaeological works - appeared to have been stolen or destroyed. Looters set little value in books.
I found a complete set of the Geographical Journal from 1893 to 1936 still intact - lying next to them was a paperback entitled Baghdad, The City of Peace - but thousands of card index sheets had been flung from their boxes over stairwells and banisters.
British, French and German archaeologists played a leading role in the discovery of some of Iraq's finest treasures. The great British Arabist, diplomatic schemer and spy Gertrude Bell, the "uncrowned queen of Iraq" whose tomb lies not far away from the museum, was an enthusiastic supporter of their work. The Germans built the modern-day museum beside the Tigris river and only in 2000 was it reopened to the public after nine years of closure following the 1991 Gulf War.
Even as the Americans encircled Baghdad, Saddam Hussein's soldiers showed almost the same contempt for its treasures as the looters. Their slit trenches and empty artillery positions are still clearly visible in the museum lawns, one of them dug beside a huge stone statue of a winged bull.
Only a few weeks ago, Jabir Khalil Ibrahim, the director of Iraq's State Board of Antiquities, referred to the museum's contents as "the heritage of the nation". They were, he said, "not just things to see and enjoy - we get strength from them to look to the future. They represent the glory of Iraq".
Mr Ibrahim has vanished, like so many government employees in Baghdad, and Mr Abdul-Jaber and his colleagues are now trying to defend what is left of the country's history with a collection of Kalashnikov rifles. "We don't want to have guns, but everyone must have them now," he told me. "We have to defend ourselves because the Americans have let this happen. They made a war against one man - so why do they abandon us to this war and these criminals?"
Half an hour later, I contacted the civil affairs unit of the US Marines in Saadun Street and gave them the exact location of the museum and the condition of its contents. A captain told me that "we're probably going to get down there". Too late. Iraq's history had already been trashed by the looters whom the Americans unleashed on the city during their "liberation".
"You are American!" a woman shouted at me in English yesterday morning, wrongly assuming I was from the US. "Go back to your country. Get out of here. You are not wanted here. We hated Saddam and now we are hating Bush because he is destroying our city." It was a mercy she could not visit the Museum of Antiquity to see for herself that the very heritage of her country - as well as her city - has been destroyed.

US accused of plans to loot Iraqi antiques

Sunday Herald

By Liam McDougall, Arts Correspondent
 
FEARS that Iraq's heritage will face widespread looting at the end of the Gulf war have been heightened after a group of wealthy art dealers secured a high-level meeting with the US administration.
It has emerged that a coalition of antiquities collectors and arts lawyers, calling itself the American Council for Cultural Policy (ACCP), met with US defence and state department officials prior to the start of military action to offer its assistance in preserving the country's invaluable archaeological collections.
The group is known to consist of a number of influential dealers who favour a relaxation of Iraq's tight restrictions on the ownership and export of antiquities. Its treasurer, William Pearlstein, has described Iraq's laws as 'retentionist' and has said he would support a post-war government that would make it easier to have antiquities dispersed to the US.
Before the Gulf war, a main strand of the ACCP's campaigning has been to persuade its government to revise the Cultural Property Implementation Act in order to minimise efforts by foreign nations to block the import into the US of objects, particularly antiques.
News of the group's meeting with the government has alarmed scientists and archaeologists who fear the ACCP is working to a hidden agenda that will see the US authorities ease restrictions on the movement of Iraqi artefacts after a coalition victory in Iraq.
Professor Lord Renfrew of Kaimsthorn, leading Cambridge archaeologist and director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, said: 'Iraqi antiquities legislation protects Iraq. The last thing one needs is some group of dealer-connected Americans interfering. Any change to those laws would be absolutely monstrous. '
A wave of protest has also come from the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA), which says any weakening of Iraq's strict antiquities laws would be 'disastrous'. President Patty Gerstenblith said: 'The ACCP's agenda is to encourage the collecting of antiquities through weakening the laws of archaeologically-rich nations and eliminate national ownership of antiquities to allow for easier export. '
The ACCP has caused deep unease among archaeologists since its creation in 2001. Among its main members are collectors and lawyers with chequered histories in collecting valuable artefacts, including alleged exhibitions of Nazi loot.
They denied accusations of attempting to change Iraq's treatment of archaeological objects. Instead, they said at the January meeting they offered 'post-war technical and financial assistance', and 'conservation support'.

Looters ransack Baghdad museum

BBC
Baghdad residents inspect looted treasure
Many precious items have been stolen by looters
Thousands of valuable historical items from Baghdad's main museum have been taken or destroyed by looters.
Nabhal Amin, deputy director at the Iraqi National Museum, blamed the destruction on the United States for not taking control of the situation on the streets.
On Saturday, Unesco - the UN's cultural agency - has urged the US and Britain to deploy troops at Iraq's key archaeological sites and museums to stop widespread looting and destruction.
Armed men have been roaming the streets of Baghdad since the city was taken by US troops on Wednesday.
Shops, government offices, presidential palaces and even hospitals have all been looted.
Call for protection
A museum guard said that since Thursday, hundreds of looters had carried away artefacts on carts and wheelbarrows.
The museum's deputy director said looters had taken or destroyed 170,000 items of antiquity dating back thousands of years.
"They were worth billions of dollars," she said
"The Americans were supposed to protect the museum. If they had just one tank and two soldiers nothing like this would have happened."
Reporters who visited the museum on Saturday saw smashed display cases and broken pieces of pottery.
Ancient cities
Treasures at the museum date back 5,000 years to the dawn of civilisation in Mesopotamia, as Iraq was once known.
Ancient archers
Iraq's history stretches back thousands of years
It houses items from ancient Babylon and Nineveh, Sumerian statues, Assyrian reliefs and 5,000-year-old tablets bearing some of the earliest known writing.
There are also gold and silver items from the Ur cemetery.
The museum re-opened to the public six months ago - it had remained closed since the beginning of the 1991 Gulf War.
Iraq is a cradle of civilisation, with thousands of archaeological sites spanning more than 10,000 years.
It is the birthplace of agriculture, empires were in Iraq and the origins of writing have been traced to the region.
Certain organisations, including the British Museum, had called for historical sites to be protected before the current conflict started.
Some of the museum's artefacts had been moved into storage to avoid a repeat of damage to other antiquities during the 1991 Gulf War.

Published on Monday, April 14, 2003 by the lndependent/UK
US Blamed for Failure to Stop Sacking of Museum
by Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles and David Keys, Archaeology Correspondent
 
The United States was fiercely criticized around the world yesterday for its failure to protect Baghdad's Iraq National Museum where, under the noses of US troops, looters stole or destroyed priceless artifacts up to 7,000 years old. In Iraq itself, art experts and ordinary demonstrators made clear they were far angrier at President George Bush than they were at the looters, noting that the only building US forces seemed genuinely interested in protecting was the Ministry of Oil.

Not a single pot or display case remained intact, according to witnesses, after a 48-hour rampage at the museum – perhaps the world's greatest repository of Mesopotamian culture. US forces intervened only once, for half an hour, before leaving and allowing the looters to continue.
Archaeologists, poets, cultural historians and international legal experts, including many in America itself, accused Washington of violating the 1954 Hague Convention on the protection of artistic treasures in wartime.
British experts were distraught at the loss. "This is a terrible tragedy. Iraq is the cradle of civilization and this was a museum which contained a large portion of the world's cultural heritage. The British Museum stands ready to help our Iraqi colleagues in whatever way we can," Dr John Curtis said. He is keeper of the Department of the Ancient Near East at the British Museum, which holds an important collection of Mesopotamian treasures.
Dr Jeremy Black a specialist on ancient Iraq at Oxford University, said: "What has befallen Baghdad and Mosul museums was foreseen by archaeologists worldwide. Meetings were even held with the American military before the war to warn of the extreme likelihood of looting should an invasion occur.
"Sadly, however, the occupying forces failed to implement in practical terms the measures to protect Iraq's and the world's cultural heritage. US and British forces must now act immediately to safeguard what remains in the museums and at key archaeological sites."
A Chicago law professor, Patty Gerstenblith of the DePaul School, said the rampage was "completely inexcusable and avoidable".
In Iraq itself, art experts and ordinary demonstrators made clear they were far angrier at President George Bush than they were at the looters, noting that the only building US forces seemed genuinely interested in protecting was the Ministry of Oil. US Marines moved quickly to protect the Iraqi oil ministry in Baghdad, surrounding the complex with razor-sharp barbed wire. US-controlled Iraq should return to the oil market within months. (AFP/EPA/Christophe Simon)
One Iraqi archaeologist, Raid Abdul Ridhar Muhammad, told The New York Times: "If a country's civilization is looted, as ours has been here, its history ends. Please tell this to President Bush. Please remind him that he promised to liberate the Iraqi people, but that this is not a liberation, this is a humiliation."
Dr Eleanor Robson, a member of the council of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, said: "The looting of the Iraq Museum is on a par with blowing up Stonehenge or ransacking the Bodleian Library. For world culture, it is a global catastrophe." Among the many treasures that have vanished, perhaps for ever, are a solid gold harp from the Sumerian era, the sculptured head of a woman from the Sumerian city of Uruk, a Ram in the Thicket statue from Ur, stone carvings, gold jewelry, tapestry fragments, ivory figurines of goddesses, friezes of soldiers, ceramic jars and urns.
The museum held the tablets with Hammurabi's Code, one of the world's earliest legal documents, early texts describing the epic of Gilgamesh and mathematical treatises that reveal a knowledge of Pythagorean geometry 1,500 years before Pythagoras.
Some of the treasures might have been removed from the museum before the war for safekeeping, but there is no indication of where they could be. Saddam Hussein may have taken some artifacts for display in his private residences.
Curators said the looters came in two categories – the angry and the poor, most of them Shias, who were bent largely on destruction and grabbing whatever they could to earn some money; and more discriminating, middle-class people who knew exactly what they were looking for. Some of the more famous pieces may be too easily recognizable to be sold on the international market, leading some experts to fear they will be destroyed.
Although the museum is only one of hundreds of buildings to fall prey to looters, its status as one of the most important repositories of ancient civilization is likely to inflame particular resentment towards the Americans, in the Arab world and beyond.
Several commentators are already starting to see more sinister motives in the US troops' neglect. Professor Giovanni Bergamini, curator of the Egyptian museum in Turin, said: "I don't know ... Perhaps it was only fathomless ignorance." He added: "But that's quite bad enough in itself." Parts of a beheaded sculpture lies among rubble after a mob of looters ransacked and looted Iraq's largest archeological museum in Baghdad(AFP/Patrick Baz)
THE LIKELY FATE OF THE STOLEN ANTIQUITIES
The antiquities being looted in Iraq fall into two different categories.
In terms of serious money – up to several million pounds per item – the more internationally famous statues, bas-reliefs, early manuscripts and groups of ivories are the more difficult, though lucrative, items to smuggle. Worldwide there are probably only a few hundred potential buyers for the more well-known material.
Such items might include the celebrated Sumerian stone statue of Dudu, the Prime Minister to the royal court of Lagash, dating back to 2600BC, or the 2300BC image of the god Abu and his consort. These would have to be sold in great secrecy. The larger objects are in danger of being deliberately damaged and then made unrecognizable to make it more difficult for police and others to trace them.
In terms of pure volume of illicit traffic, the smaller, often unpublished items such as coins, cylinder seals, cuneiform tablets, pottery, figurines, flint tools and bronze weapons are likely to dominate sectors of the antiquities market. They will probably end up at the art markets of Paris, via Jordan, Israel, and Switzerland, New York, London and Tokyo.
Their value, in total, could quite conceivably run to billions of pounds – with the profits lining the pockets of the more unscrupulous of the European and North American-based dealers. Somewhere between Switzerland and antique shops in Britain and elsewhere, all knowledge of an object's Iraqi provenance will be lost.
The museum's computer system, with the inventory of its contents, is understood to have been smashed – but whether the hard disks have been damaged is not yet known.
© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

Story from BBC NEWS:

US experts resign over Iraq looting
Three White House cultural advisers have resigned in protest at the failure of US forces to prevent the looting of Iraq's national museum - home to artefacts dating back 10,000 years.
Priceless statues, manuscripts and other treasures were taken away in a wave of lawlessness following the collapse of the government of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad last week.
"It didn't have to happen", Martin Sullivan - who chaired the President's Advisory Committee on Cultural Property for eight years - told Reuters news agency.
The tragedy was not prevented, due to our nation's inaction
Martin Sullivan
committee chairman
"In a pre-emptive war that's the kind of thing you should have planned for," he said.
In his letter of resignation, Mr Sullivan - who also heads a historic commission in Maryland - called the looting a "tragedy" and said many other Americans shared his feelings.
'Open floodgate'
His disquiet was echoed by Richard S Lanier and Gary Vikan of the 11-member committee composed of experts and professionals from the art world.
According to the Associated Press, Mr Lanier - director of a New York foundation - attacked "the administration's total lack of sensitivity and forethought regarding the Iraq invasion and loss of cultural treasures".
PRESUMED MISSING
80,000 cuneiform tablets with world's earliest writing
Bronze figure of Akkadian king - 4,500 years old
Silver harp from ancient city of Ur - 4,000 years old
Three-foot carved Sumerian vase - 5,200 years old
Headless statue of Sumerian king Entemena - 4,600 years old
Carved sacred cup - 4,600 years old
And Mr Vikan - director of Baltimore's Walters Art Museum - criticised the American failure to curb "what is now an open floodgate", the agency said.
As well as the national museum in Baghdad, a museum in Mosul was looted and the capital's Islamic Library, which housed ancient manuscripts including one of the oldest surviving copies of the Koran, was ravaged by fire.
The UN's cultural agency Unesco has called the loss and destruction already suffered as "a disaster".
The US has pledged to recover and repair the items looted.
Secretary of State Colin Powell said the Baghdad museum was "one of the great museums in the world" and that the US would take a leading role in restoring it.

Call to seal Iraqi borders to end smuggling of looted antiquities
A first-hand description of the looting of Iraq National Museum
By Martin Bailey
LONDON Iraq museum curator Dr Donny George is calling for US forces to patrol Iraq’s borders, in order to block the smuggling of looted antiquities. Speaking at an international meeting at the British Museum in London on 29 April, he described how he had passed through the Iraqi-Jordanian frontier just three days earlier, without any inspection. “The Americans are not patrolling the borders. It would be very easy just to spend five or ten minutes checking cars and luggage,” he told the London meeting. Otherwise there is nothing to stop smugglers taking out looted antiquities. UK Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell, who was also on the platform, promised to raise the matter with the British Foreign Secretary “at the earliest possible moment”.
Dr George had earlier in the day received an emotional welcome at a private session of the meeting of international experts on Iraq. For the past few weeks, he has repeatedly risked his own personal security to protect the National Museum and its collection. Even the trip to London was hazardous. He and British Museum keeper Dr John Curtis, who had gone out to Iraq, were robbed at gunpoint on the long overland journey from Baghdad to the Jordanian border.
The first-hand description of events in Baghdad shocked the international experts. Dr George described how staff had been forced to abandon the museum in the morning of 8 April, when members of Saddam Hussein’s militia “came into our garden and began firing on American tanks.” Three hours later Dr George and his colleagues attempted to return, but were forced back by fighting. Small numbers of staff later came back, but they were unable to prevent the first looters from entering the museum on 10 April.
One of the museum employees implored US tanks to move slightly closer to protect the building, but they refused, saying they had no authority. “The Americans just had to move their tank 50 metres, but they said they had no orders. Why did the Americans deliberately leave the museum unguarded?”, Dr George asked at the London meeting. Looting continued until 12 April and on the following day Dr George and antiquities director Dr Jabir Khalil succeeded in making direct contact with senior US officials to plead for military protection for the museum. The promised tanks did not arrive until 16 April.
Dr George is convinced that the first wave of looters were engaged in a planned operation, since they had glass-cutters and did not touch replicas which were on display. Instead, they immediately went for the masterpieces. The looters later broke down a bricked-up entrance, to penetrate doors leading to the basement vault. All 120 administrative offices were also looted, with papers strewn all over the floors.
Assessing the losses
Initial reports suggested that the museum had lost most of the collection. Senior museum official Nabhal Amin was quoted on 12 April as saying, “they have looted or destroyed 170,000 items”, representing the full inventory. Fortunately, the scale of the losses now seems to have been much smaller, thanks to precautionary measures.
Dr George told The Art Newspaper that only around 100 objects had been left in the public galleries, items which were too heavy or fragile to move. The majority of these were looted, including many extremely important objects. Among the ancient masterpieces probably lost from the galleries are the Warka Vase of 3100 BC, gold from the lyre of Ur, gold rosettes and a copper cup from Tell Ubaid and a headless statue of King Entemena of Lagash. Other stone statues which proved too difficult to remove were damaged, but some large stone reliefs escaped relatively unscathed.
The situation inside the vault is more difficult to assess, since the area has not been officially entered by museum staff. But, by peering through the hole broken into the brick wall, Dr George and Dr Curtis were able to see that in the first section, pots and other objects had been swept off shelves and abandoned on the floor. The extent of the losses remain unknown, but the hope is that in the darkened basement the looters would have found it difficult to locate the items of major financial value. Dr George believes that only a small proportion of the 170,000 objects in the vaults may have been looted, although this will only be confirmed after months of checking.
The National Museum’s most valuable objects are now thought to be safe in the vaults of the central bank. Although it was known that the recently discovered Nimrud gold treasures had been stored there, Dr George told The Art Newspaper that gold coins and other portable valuables had also been deposited at the central bank. Although the ground floor of the bank was looted, rubble from US bombing or artillery fortuitously blocked the entrance to the vaults. This has not yet been cleared, but the expectation is that the museum’s most valuable objects are safe.
But despite this latest encouraging news from Baghdad, it has to be stressed that the full extent of the losses will only become apparent once the museum vaults have been properly examined and the central bank safe has been checked. It remains clear that the looting and vandalism at the National Museum represents a tragedy which will take years to deal with.
Next steps
The hope now is that looters will voluntarily return objects to the museum, and this is already happening. Every day people are bringing back objects, including a figure of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III, which was returned in three fragments. There is currently an amnesty, with no questions being asked about returned objects, and eventually rewards may be offered for important items. Dr George praised local imams for calling for the return of looted museum items.
Both the British Museum and Unesco are urgently planning to send out teams of international experts to assist the National Museum to deal with the situation. British Museum director Neil MacGregor and Dr Curtis are liaising closely with the Metropolitan Museum, the Louvre, the Berlin Museum and the Hermitage, as well as with university departments specialising in Iraqi archaeology. But Mr MacGregor and Dr Curtis constantly stress the importance of assisting Iraqi colleagues, rather than imposing western solutions. Funds are already available to send out specialists, but there are still concerns over whether Iraq is safe for civilian personnel. Sending equipment will also be difficult before the proper opening of Baghdad airport.
So far attention has been largely focussed on the National Museum, but there has also been serious looting and damage to other museums. Mosul Museum, the most important regional collection, was hit by looting even more badly that the museum in Baghdad. Another pressing priority is to assess damage to archaeological sites, and there is a strong feeling that this should be undertaken under the authority of Iraqi archaeologists.
Meanwhile, diplomatic moves are underway to encourage the UN Security Council to take tough action to outlaw the trade in looted Iraqi antiquities. The fear is that when existing sanctions are rescinded, this will remove one barrier to the import of Iraqi antiquities. The hope, therefore, is that the Security Council will require states to introduce a total ban on the import of all Iraqi antiquities for a limited period. UNESCO director-general Koïchiro Matsuura raised this proposal with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in New York on 30 April and the matter is now being considered by Security Council members.Preliminary and partial list of looted objects in the Iraq Museum, Baghdad
(Numbers in [] brackets refer to illustrations, numbers in {}brackets refer to page numbers in F. Basmachi, Treasures of the Iraq Museum, Baghdad 1976. “IM” numbers are registration numbers)
“Warka Vase” – alabaster vase decorated with reliefs, c. 3100 BC. From Uruk IM 19606. [31] {396}
“Warka Head” – life-size female head, c. 3100 BC. From Uruk. IM 45434. [21] {396}
Headless, inscribed statue of King Entemena of Lagash, c. 2400 BC IM 5. [538] {398}
Ivory of lion attacking Nubian, c. 850-750 BC. From Nimrud IM 56642. [175] {405}
Handle formed by double figure of nude female. From Nimrud IM 56346. [176] {405}
Ivory chair back with five figures, c. 850-750 BC. From Nimrud IM 61898. [178] {405}
Ivory chair-back with sun-disc symbol, c. 850-750 BC. From Nimrud IM 62722. [177] {405}
Limestone statue of Hermes, c. 200 BC. From Nineveh IM 59094. [198] {406}
Head from time of Trajan. From Hatra IM 73039. [234 centre] {408}
Marble statue of Poseidon, c. AD 160. From Hatra IM 73005. [199] {406}
Head of marble statue of Apollo, body of statue smashed c. AD 160. From Hatra IM 73004. [200] {406}
Marble statue of Eros, c. AD 160. From Hatra IM 73041. [201] {406}
Lid of marble casket. From Hatra IM 58068. [221] {407}
Limestone head in Parthian style. From Hatra IM 56777. [234 left] {408}
Limestone head of Tyche. From Hatra IM 73010. [234 right] {408}
Bronze head from a Greek figure of Nike. From Hatra.
Head from marble statue of a seated goddess. From Hatra IM 58086. [245] {408}
Wooden door from mosque in Mosul, 12th century AD IM A677. [277] {410}
Islamic wooden pillars.
Reconstructed lyre from Ur. Gold stripped off IM 8694. [82] {399}
Terracotta lions, c. 1800 BC. From Tell Harmal, smashed IM 52559-60. [107] {401}
Caryatid Assyrian god. From Khorsabad, smashed IM 25963/11949. [140] {403}For illustrations of pieces believed to have been looted click here
For complete photographs from the 1976 catalogue of the Iraq National Museum click here. Pieces believed to be missing are highlighted in red.

Meanwhile:

Garner: Americans Should Beat Chests with Pride
Wed April 30, 2003 08:01 AM ET
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The retired general overseeing Iraq's postwar reconstruction said on Wednesday that his fellow Americans should beat their chests with pride at having toppled Saddam Hussein without destroying the country's assets.
"We ought to be beating our chests every day. We ought to look in a mirror and get proud and stick out our chests and suck in our bellies and say: 'Damn, we're Americans!'," Jay Garner told reporters, saying that Iraq's oil fields and other infrastructure survived the war almost intact.
Garner, who was speaking after talks with visiting Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in Baghdad, took the media to task for emphasizing anti-American demonstrations and dissent in the wake of the three-week U.S. led war that deposed Saddam.
His comments came after U.S. troops opened fire for the second time this week on an angry crowd protesting against the U.S. presence in the town of Falluja, west of Baghdad. Iraqi hospital officials said two men were killed in the latest incident. At least 13 died in shooting on Monday, they said.
Garner said the war was fought in a way that prevented Saddam's forces from setting fire to its oilfields and had largely preserved Iraq's infrastructure intact:
"I was planning on the oilfields being torched, a huge humanitarian crisis and a monumental reconstruction task, " he said.
"There is no humanitarian crisis ... and there's not much infrastructure problem here, other than getting the electrical grid structure back together."
The situation in Baghdad was improving every day and power had been restored to about half of the city, he said.
The U.S. military is increasing its presence in the Iraqi capital to boost security and help in wiping out pockets of resistance from diehard Saddam supporters.