Dear Gang,
Since archaeologists told the army that the ONE thing above all
else that had to be protected was the museum that housed all of Iraq's
antiquities, that was the one place that the army refused to protect,
even with a single tank and two soldiers!
Michael
Looters Ransack Baghdad's Antiquities Museum
By REUTERS
Filed at 9:00 a.m. ET
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.
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