When American forces stormed Baghdad on April 9, 2003 and tore down a statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square, the first center of his grotesque regime that they occupied was the oil ministry. For many Iraqis, this was evidence of the United States’ priorities.

But as battle-weary grunts cordoned off the ministry’s offices, gangs were already rampaging through the National Museum of Iraq’s 18 galleries across town. They broke into storage vaults and steel cases to pillage priceless treasures, despoiling the birthplace of the written word, codified laws, organized religion, science, war and agriculture. Iraq is home to the cradle of civilization, where in 3500 BC the world’s first cities arose in a cluster across lower Mesopotamia – “the land between the two rivers.”

The Sumerians were the first to start building. They migrated from the highlands of Iran and northern Anatolia around 3000 BC. Then came the Chaldeans, Assyrians and the Babylonians, whose great king Hammurabi drew up the first code of laws. Artifacts from these peoples wound up in the halls of Baghdad’s national museum, which was founded in 1926 by intrepid British explorer and administrator Gertrude Bell. It became arguably the most important collection of human antiquities, chronicling more than 8,500 years of human history.

But as US forces toppled Saddam in 2003, then-US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld brushed aside concerns about the archaeological plundering. “Stuff happens,” the acerbic defense secretary shrugged. “Freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.”

Donny George Youkhanna, Iraq’s most prominent archaeologist, and the director of the National Museum during the US invasion, called the looting “the crime of the century.” Some 14,000 objects – a dozen of them “world class masterpieces” – were plundered from the collection in April 2003, he says. Fewer than half have been located and some of the most prized treasures have vanished into the hidden world of private art collection.

Youkhanna, a Christian and former president of the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, was forced to flee to Syria and then to the US because of alleged threats from militias allied to the Shi’ite Islamists running Iraq today. He is now a visiting professor of anthropology at Stony Brook State University in New York. A freeboot frenzy. The looting went on for five days in early April, before US troops were deployed around the museum.

But the culprits, who were clearly organized to seek out specific treasures – presumably to sell to rapacious collectors – then fanned out across a country that had been plunged into chaos by the collapse of the Ba’athist regime. Museums in other cities, such as Mosul in the north and Babylon in the south, were ransacked or torched.

Irreplaceable Islamic books, maps and manuscripts disappeared or went up in smoke. Five years later, the looting of Iraq’s cultural heritage continues at the country’s estimated 11,000 archeological sites. Unscrupulous foreign dealers often hire gangs to scour the sites, and buy the cooperation of the clans who control large tracts of the country.

The bandit groups of between 200 and 300 men are highly organized and heavily armed. They rip apart historical sites, some of which have yet to be officially excavated. A few of these operations are family affairs, with impoverished clans digging up pottery shards for a few dinars.

However, most are massive quarrying operations complete with bulldozers, mechanical diggers and dump trucks. They operate in broad daylight and with virtual impunity, since protecting archeological sites is at the bottom of the US’s security priorities. Many of the plundered sites now resemble cratered moonscapes because of the holes that looters have left.

To combat this, Baghdad mustered a 1,400-strong Mobile Archaeological Site Protection Force in 2006. But the gangs usually outgun it. The protection force is staffed by poorly paid, unmotivated men who have proven ineffective. Besides, security officials estimate it would take 50,000 to 75,000 guards to protect the sites properly. And unfortunately, there’s little prospect of pulling together a force of those numbers in the current security situation.

A new catastrophe. The destruction at Iraq’s archeological sites, many experts say, has been more devastating than the pillage of Baghdad’s national museum. Priceless artifacts that cast light on humanity’s origins are now vanishing before they can be studied. As a result, archaeologist are being deprived of their chance to piece together how Mesopotamia’s ancient societies developed.

“We may never know how many Gilgamesh-like epics have been lost,” lamented Mehiyar Kathem, a fund-raiser for Cultural Heritage Awareness Initiative (which is a project of Baghdad’s non-governmental organization, Culture For All). He goes so far as to call the ongoing looting campaigns “one of the greatest catastrophes to befall humanity.” McGuire Gibson, a professor of Mesopotamian history at the University of Chicago who has led major archaeological projects in Iraq, estimated in early 2007 that thieves were taking upwards of 15,000 objects every day from these sites.

Few of the plundered antiquities – sculptures, jewelry and 5,000-year-old cuneiform tablets containing the world’s earliest writing – are likely to show up on the open market. They’re well known, and lists of the stolen items have been circulated to recognized dealers and auction houses. Instead, the plundered items will be sold on the black market for millions of dollars. Gibson noted that, of the 4,000 objects stolen from Iraqi museums after the 1991 Gulf War, “maybe two” have been recovered.

Extremist links. Matthew Bogdanos, a New York State assistant district attorney and a colonel in the US Marine Corps Reserve who served in Iraq in 2003, said on March 18 that the smuggling of stolen antiquities was helping finance insurgent groups in Iraq. Bogdanos has been praised by archaeological experts as one of the few US officers who attempted to protect the National Museum in Baghdad and recover stolen antiquities.

During a two-day United Nations conference in Athens on returning antiquities to their country of origin, Bogdanos said there were “undeniable” links between the smuggling and the extremist groups. “The Taliban uses opium to finance their activities in Afghanistan,” he said. “Well, they don’t have opium in Iraq. What they have [is] an almost limitless supply of antiquities. And so they’re using antiquities.”

Archaeologists and historians believe much of the sophisticated looting of the National Museum was conducted by employees who knew where the most precious objects were located. Bogdanos has no doubts. “It’s well known, well proven that much of the theft from the museum was from museum insiders and senior government officials,” he said. “Not all of it by any means, but much of it.”

But security officials are skeptical about the extent to which profits from the illicit sale of antiquities fund the insurgency. Youkhanna talks of “a huge mafia for smuggling antiquities,” and says, “there are a lot of people inside Iraq” near the plundered sites “buying these things from the looters there. They are not Iraqis, they’re Europeans.” Other corrupt dealers have operated from Iran, Turkey, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, he adds.

The looters who plundered the Baghdad museum “knew what they wanted. These were not random looters,” Youkhanna says. “They had glasscutters and even sets of keys, which they left behind. The replica items, which would have looked real to a mob, were untouched.” Systematic destruction. According to Joanne Farchakh-Bajjaly, a Lebanese archaeologist who helped document the missing treasures, looters have ransacked the 4,000-year-old Sumerian cities in the country’s southern region.

“In the Nasiriyah area alone, there are about 840 Sumerian sites. They have all been systematically looted,” she explained. The gangs of robbers and looters have not spared “one meter of these Sumerian capitals, [which] have been buried under the sand for thousands of years.”

Coalition and Iraqi military operations are adding to the damage, she says. The weight of military vehicles at the American base at Ur is literally cracking the walls of that ancient city as if the site were suffering from a continuous earthquake. Farchakh, who is a tireless campaigner for international action to help stem the unfolding archaeological catastrophe, warns that the looting is eradicating the ancient history of Mesopotamia. And it’s getting worse.

“The robbers are destroying everything because they’re going down to bedrock,” she says. “They systematically destroyed the remains of this civilization in their tireless search for sellable artifacts. Humankind is losing its past for a cuneiform tablet, or a sculpture, or piece of jewelry.”

Lost and found Found: The Warka Vase, a 91-cm-high alabaster carved ceremonial vessel from the Sumerian era, dated to ca. 3200 BC, and considered a masterpiece because it’s inscribed with one of the earliest known narrative illustrations showing a temple procession. One of the most valuable objects stolen from the Baghdad museum, it was returned, but smashed into 14 pieces. Found: The life-size statue of King Entemena of Sumeria, dated to 2430 BC. The black, headless statue was stolen from the Baghdad museum and recovered by US Customs. It was handed over to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki when he visited Washington in 2006. Found: The statue of Shalmanasar III, king of Assyria, along with cuneiform tablets – written documents preserved in clay from civilizations thousands of years old. The statue was stolen from the Baghdad museum, but returned in May 2003 – broken into two pieces – by two young Iraqis. They also returned eight other important pieces they had stolen the month. Lost: The Ivory Plaque of Nimrod, known as “The Lioness and the Nubian” depicting in relief a lioness attacking a Nubian man. Covered in gold and inlaid with precious stones, it was part of a pair. The other is in the British Museum in London. Lost: 80,000 cuneiform tablets with the world’s earliest writings. Cuneiform is a form of written expression created by the Sumerians ca. 3000 BC, which evolved from a system of pictographs.

Endangered sites Babylon. Some 70 km south of Baghdad on the Euphrates, Nebuchadnezzar’s great city was the capital of Babylonia for more than 1,000 years. US forces bulldozed the relic-rich subsoil to fill sandbags. “Babylon is being rendered archaeologically barren,” British columnist Simon Jenkins wrote in The Guardian in June 2007. Nimrod. The ancient Assyrian capital, which is home of the palace of Assurnasirpal II in what is now northern Iraq. Its gold-filled royal tombs remained undiscovered until 1988. Nineveh. Another capital of ancient Assyria, it lies on the Tigris in northern Iraq near modern-day Mosul. It was an important site for the prophet Jonah, according to the Old Testament. Nippur. An important Babylonian city dedicated to the god Enil some 150 km south of Babylon The great ziggurat – a colossal, stepped platform made from baked mud bricks that was supposedly topped by a temple at one time – has been smashed in three places by looters. Umma. Modern-day Tel Jokha in Dha Qar Province houses Umma, a third millennium BC Sumerian settlement northwest of Nasiriyah. It has also been ravaged by robber gangs. Ur. Reputedly the earliest city on earth, it is one of the few sites guarded by a US military presence. The Mesopotamian city was founded by the Sumerians about 4,000 BC. With its massive ziggurat, Ur is one of the most important archeological sites in the world. It is also believed to have been the birthplace of the Prophet Abraham. Although US forces now protect it, Ur suffered damage during the 1991 Gulf War.

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