Posted on 04/12/2003 7:05:07 AM PDT by kalt
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 six months ago 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.
I'll bet the stuff in the Museum were copies and/or forgeries. And what were the Museum Guards doing???sipping tea??
Can we say "Insurance Fraud" ? What do you bet this stuff is insured by LLoyds or something ?
Good grief. from whom was she to have gotten the permission and funding to pack up and move antiquities out of the country? - Her cooperative former regime? Fine... See every discontent who said unkind things right now as the enemy. I see them as just one of the things we are going to have to deal with. We can be mature, and through our actions overall hope that the Iraqis who are not immediately contented eventually see us as benevolent, or we can call her scum because she isn't an instant fan of this invasion or its immediate impact on her. Would it help her gain perspective to be called scum by us? Or would it help more for us to keep our heads and not overreact to every emotion that is not supportive?
Blame it ALL on Bush.
Are you for real? What paper in the Middle East would have printed a headline like that? Had our troops gone there and protected their antiquities as you would have liked them to do, do you really think that it would have made a big difference? It probably never would have made the paper because it would have been something positive, and God forbid they should give the U.S. credit for doing anything right. You're dreaming if you think that scenario would have played out the way you cooked it up in your mind.
Let's say some of our troops had been guarding the museum, and an American soldier had to open fire to keep people from entering. How do you think that would have played out in the Arab papers? Not very well I'd say and you're dreaming again if you think it would. It wasn't Americans who looted the museum afterall, it was Iraqis. They stole their own heritage, so it appears they didn't think much of it to begin with.
U.S. troops were and still are engaged in fighting off various hardliners. You have no idea where this museum is situated, nor the condition of the neighborhood. I'm sorry, but I can't agree with you that this was a priority for the United States. The real priority for the troops was and still is, cleansing Baghdad of Saddam's followers while trying to stay alive. I can't believe that you'd put a lousy museum ahead of the safety of our troops. Tell me it ain't so.
Get over it. Museums have dead history in them. I am more concerned about the living troops still in firefights and still getting killed in Iraq. Iraq's future is much more important than its past.
Without our troops Iraq would still be living in its Saddam induced misery. This museum has only been opened for the past six months, having been closed since 1991. Many of the treasures of Iraq are now in museums in London, Paris and Pennsylvania. I think the looting started before the war did. The lady is crying crocodile tears whether you are or not.
Can we hope it was a French insurance firm?
Exactly! How did she get and keep her job?
I just heard on local (ABC) radio news that some of the recently looted items are already listed on Ebay.
It's not as if there hasn't been a lot of actual looting going on. I don't find the Museum director's account hard to believe. I don't find your alternative account hard to believe either, but if I had to guess which is the truth I'd go with the simplest explanation.
(And obviously, whatever happened, agreeing with her assessment of blame is another matter altogether.)
I'm with you on this. This isn't going to make me question the whole plan, but on this detail we screwed up and ought to be looking into ways to recover the loot.
Perhaps, though, I'm glad we weren't guilty of bombing the museum.
I'm wondering what day and hour the perps broke into the "vault-like" museum and what skirmishes their co-perps might have been instigated at the same hour to distract the coalition troops.
Small town bank robbers have been known to set off false fire alarms in order to distract officers away from the "held-up" bank.
It might take at least a little while to determine how much of a blot our record deserves, how much of a blot the museum deserves, and how much of a blot the perps deserve.
Iraq needs to begin governing itself. They can start by recovering the stolen items and prosecuting the thieves. Many of the looters are professional.
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