Looters Ransack Baghdad's Antiquities Museum

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.

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.

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.

Rumsfeld and Franks knew there would be looting after Saddam was taken out.

They knew that marines and soldiers and airmen would DIE in this war. Wow, and 120 men and women died. Why didnt they stop that? Does that make them negligent for not preventing it? On the day of this looting, marines were still fighting and dying in baghdad firefights. they are being blamed for not controlling what they hadnt had control over. You might as well be blaming them for not winning the war with so many casualties!

Insults aside, you are arguing past my point, which is that 20/20 hindsight and "woulda coulda shoulda" are different from making life-and-death decisions real-time in the fog of war. Criticism is much easier than constructive solutions. Just say "mistakes were made" and leave it at that. I JUST WANT YOU GUYS TO CUT THE US MILITARY SOME SLACK!

After just one hour of research here's what I have found on the "looting" :

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The main entrance to Baghdad's antiquities museum is firmly shut, sandbags are stacked up near the gates, and priceless treasures have been spirited away for safe keeping.
Every moveable piece was packed up in crates a week ago and removed from the museum, he added.
http://216.239.33.100/search?q=cache:d9AfWlwiYW4C:asia.news.yahoo.com/030312/3/tjtf.html+%22donny+george%22+baghdad&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

“The experts, which included Iraqi art officials, said some of the most valuable pieces had been placed in the vault of the national bank after the 1991 Gulf War, but they had no information on whether the items were still there.” http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-2575224,00.html

"Most of the things were removed. We knew a war was coming, so it was our duty to protect everything," Mr. George said. "We thought there would be some sort of bombing at the museum. We never thought it could be looted." http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB105053292455773900,00.html

“Officials at the UNESCO meeting at its headquarters in Paris said the information was still too sketchy to determine exactly what was missing and how many items were unaccounted for.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-2575224,00.html

Some believe that individuals, including government employees, are taking the best pieces out overland through Jordan
Hamdoon said that many pieces had disappeared from provincial Iraqi museums after the war.
http://www.usfca.edu/~trembath/www-class/iraq-antiquities.html

Some of the objects on display here are reproductions, with their originals removed by conquering nations to be displayed in foreign museums. The Louvre in Paris, London's British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania Museum in the US all contain antiquities from ancient Mesopotamia. Some pieces have been returned, but the effective closure of the country seems to preclude any further returns for the foreseeable future. http://www.arab.net/iraq/iq_baghdadsights.htm
Sensing the treasures could be in peril, museum curators secretly removed antiquities from their display cases before the war and placed them in storage vaults - but to no avail. The doors of the vaults were opened or smashed, and everything inside was taken, museum workers said.

That led one museum employee to suspect that people familiar with the museum may have participated in the theft.

``The fact that the vaults were opened suggests employees of the museum may have been involved,'' said the staffer, who declined to be identified. ``To ordinary people, these are just stones. Only the educated know the value of these pieces.''
http://www.thesundaymail.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5936,6281650%255E25777,00.html

The museum's most famous holding may have been tablets with Hammurabi's Code - one of mankind's earliest codes of law.
It could not be determined whether the tablets were at the museum when the war broke out.
http://www.thesundaymail.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5936,6281650%255E25777,00.html

In one possibly encouraging sign, several people in the Al Awi neighborhood that surrounds the museum said they did not see looters leave with any antiquities, even amid gun battles and looting that lasted two days.
But he said the only items from the collection he saw stolen were several old rifles. Mostly, he said, he saw looters take chairs, typewriters, ceiling lamp fixtures and other items from the museum's offices, as happened at nearly every other government office in the capital.

Abed El Rahman, a museum security guard who lives on the premises, also said that rifles were the only items he saw stolen from the collections. "But many people were carrying boxes," he said. "I don't know what was in the boxes."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/17/international/worldspecial/17MUSE.html

Saddam Fedayeen killed a marine guarding a hospital yesterday ... we cant win.

Excellent point. Especially for those that think that this was an "American screw-up". Tell that to the parents of the young man standing guard at this hospital. There is a timetable that occurs before one can change from soldier to policeman. The "screw-up" is NOT the soldier's, especially when there was plenty of warning to protect this place prior to the Marines coming in, there apparently was plenty of "cash" around to buy protection, there was plenty of effort made by the Iraqi authorities to protect weapons, 50+ Mig fighters, etc.

The blame for the "screw-up" is clearly that of the Iraqi authorities, who possibly may have even paid for the thievery to give the media another thing to "blame America first" with, just as they did with the "missle in the market" coverup they orchestrated, killing their own citizens for negative PR for America. Shame on any that buy into this way of thinking.

We screwed up. Face it. We don't have to protect every part of Iraqi culture but there is NO excuse for not protecting that one museum. It's like letting people steal the original copy of the Declaration of Independence. How would you like that?

To make your analogy work, you have to be talking to the audience of the invading country of the USA that allowed the stealing of the Declaration of Independence. You are not. You are talking to (for the most part) Americans, paralleling a precious treasure of our own, to make us understand what a "precious treasure" is apparently, no need.

The right analogy would see the logic that if we were about to be invaded, that we would have done everything in our power to protect the Declaration of Independence and other precious artifacts that WE consider important to our heritage. Hence the question remains, why didn't Iraq do this? The answer is pretty obvious, that this was most likely done by the Iraqi's to feed the "blame America" mindset.

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