April 12
— 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.
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