Lost time: damage control in Iraq

Natural History, June, 2003 by John Malcolm Russell

The looting of the National Museum itself began on April 10 and continued sporadically for several days. Successive waves of looters broke into dozens of rooms. Tens of thousands of documents, photographs, slides, and index cards were scattered over floors throughout much of the building.

Some of the papers had been gathered into piles by vandals who, it is thought, had intended to turn them into bonfires to burn the building down. But they must have been disturbed--possibly by other gangs of thieves. Some looters came equipped with glass and metal cutters and other tools--as well as trucks and vans for hauling away heavy pieces of looted treasure. The better-organized gangs ignored replicas and stole only genuine ancient treasures. And with considerable organization, they manhandled all the museum's safes into one room--presumably where they had installed their metalcutting equipment.

Looters also attacked the National Library, the library of the Ministry of Religious Affairs, and the library at Baghdad University. The museum in the northern city of Mosul--filled with treasures from Nineveh, Nimrud, and Hatra--was also badly looted.

More objects have probably been damaged than have been stolen. Many people outside Iraq have been at a loss to explain the sheer vandalism that Iraqis directed against their own cultural heritage. But as far as the poor of Baghdad are concerned, that heritage had become a surrogate for Saddam Hussein. Images of Hussein dressed as the seventh-century B.C. Babylonian ruler Nebuchadnezzar II stared down on Baghdad's population. Giant helmeted heads at a presidential palace in Baghdad depicted Hussein as the Muslim military leader Saladin. Top Republican Guard divisions were named after ancient Mesopotamian kings.

There is, of course, also plenty of anger in Iraq that the Baghdad National Museum was not protected by U.S. forces when they first occupied the city. Just a few days before the invasion, leading academics met with officials from the Pentagon and the State Department to discuss how best to protect Iraq's cultural artifacts, and the National Museum was number one on the list. The academics warned that serious looting would be inevitable unless the museum was properly guarded.

Yet the U.S. military offered virtually no protection to the museum during the first six days of the U.S. occupation. When the museum staff asked for help from a nearby tank crew, the soldiers told them that they had no orders to protect the building. Even when top museum officials appealed directly to senior military officers, no protection materialized.

The lack of a coordinated military response to what Donny George, the director of research at the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, has called "the crime of the century" was still the rule of the day three weeks after the initial occupation of Baghdad. U.S. troops stationed at border posts were still not searching vehicles for looted treasure, noted George, who personally crossed the Iraqi-Jordanian border. "Anyone can take anything and go out of the country," George added. "It's a tragedy."