from: http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0413war-museum13.html

Iraq National Museum plundered by looters
Hamza Hendawi
Associated Press
Apr. 13, 2003 12:00 AM

BAGHDAD - The Iraq National Museum, home of extraordinary Babylonian, Sumerian and Assyrian collections and rare Islamic texts, sat empty Saturday, except for shattered glass and cracked pottery that littered the floor.

In an unchecked frenzy of cultural theft, looters who pillaged government buildings and businesses after the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime also targeted the museum. Gone were irreplaceable archaeological treasures from the Cradle of Civilization.

Everything that could be carried out has disappeared from the museum - gold bowls and drinking cups, ritual masks worn in funerals, elaborately wrought headdresses, lyres studded with jewels - priceless craftsmanship from ancient Mesopotamia.

"This is the property of this nation and the treasure of 7,000 years of civilization. What does this country think it is doing?" Ali Mahmoud, a museum employee, asked, futility and frustration in his voice.

Much of the looting occurred Thursday, said a security guard who stood by helplessly as hordes broke into the museum with wheelbarrows and carts and stole jewelry, clay tablets and manuscripts.

Left behind were row upon row of empty glass cases, some smashed, others left intact, heaps of crumbled pottery and hunks of broken statues scattered across the exhibit floors.

Sensing its treasures could be in peril, museum curators secretly removed antiquities from their display cases before the war and placed them into storage vaults, but to no avail. The doors of the vaults were opened or smashed, and everything was taken, museum workers said. That led one museum employee to suspect that others familiar with the museum may have participated in the looting.

"To ordinary people, these are just stones," said the employee, who declined to be identified. "Only the educated know the value of these pieces."

Gordon Newby, a historian and professor of Middle Eastern studies at Emory University in Atlanta, said 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 began.