A Baghdad mob had looted the National Museum, the largest in Iraq, amid a breakdown in civil authority following the war. Damage was also reported in other museums.

Most items pillaged at Iraq’s national museum will likely never be recovered, amid indications the looting was a planned operation and some artefacts are already being sold, the museum’s director said. "The proof is that they didn’t take replicas, which were done in Egypt, of the Hammurabi Code or the Black Obelisk from Nimrub (south of Baghdad). They knew that the originals are (respectively) in Paris and in the British Museum in London."

He also pointed out that the looters used instruments that cut through the thick glass covering some of the valuable objects without damaging them. These aren’t instruments that are of common use. These are mafias of experts who worked in a very well-organised manner."

"Among the most regrettable losses were the Secret Vase of Warka from Uruk (in southern Iraq) of the Sumerian period, from around 3,000 BC, and a bronze statue from 2,300 BC of the Akkadian period," he said.

Also some other pieces of lesser importance had been put away before the looting by museum authorities.

"I don’t know which mafia is behind these thefts but I hope that thanks to the publicity and the cooperation of international cultural authorities we will be able to find some pieces very soon," he said. Two U. S. tanks are now guarding the entrance to the museum, near where Iraqi troops were once stationed. U. S. forces, however, arrived too late to stop the ransacking.

On April 11, ancient items such as the wooden portal of King Sargon II, dated 720 BC, statues and ceramic works were whisked away or shattered into thousands of pieces on the floor of the museum. While international cultural groups had pleaded with the U. S. A. before the start of the war to spare archaeological sites, the attention seemed focused on avoiding bombing, not looting. When the crowds rushed into the museum, a number of items were seen to be protected with packing foam or sandbags.

But nothing remains of the museum’s archives including old photographs, slides, documents and books, which were strewn across the charred rooms amid sand and shattered glass. The museum’s destruction has been a public relations nightmare for the world.

The chairman of the U. S. President’s Advisory Committee on Cultural Property, Martin Sullivan, resigned in protest after eight years on the job, writing in a letter to George W. Bush that the devastation of the museum was a "tragedy" and the result of U. S. negligence.

Visitors to the Iraqi National Museum found themselves trampling over shards of broken pottery and glass from smashed display cabinets.

Staff blamed American forces for not protecting the museum. Nabhal Amin, the deputy director, wept as she claimed the thieves had looted or destroyed 170,000 items "worth billions of dollars." Other sources suggested 10,000 items had been on display. Some of the looting was well organised. At least a dozen thieves went through the ground-floor rooms undisturbed. They broke into rooms that were built like bank vaults with large steel doors. They were looking for treasures such as ivory and a silver harp dating back to 2,000 BC found in the city of Ur, birth place of Abraham, the Old Testament patriarch. Some of the items were discovered by Sir Max Mullowan, the mid-20th-century British archaeologist who was married to Agatha Christie, the crime writer. Two men were seen hauling an ancient doorway out of the building and empty wooden crates were scattered over the floor. Statues and pottery artefacts were smashed or overturned.

The curators claimed American officers had ignored requests to place guards outside the museum. Muhsen Kadhirn, a museum guard for 30 years, said: "We know people are hungry but what are they going to do with these antiquities?"

Kadhirn, who said he had been overwhelmed by the looters, added: "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." The museum has told four of its guards to carry guns to protect what antiquities remain in the upstairs rooms of the museum. Some of the items had been moved into storage to avoid bomb damage, as occurred during the 1991 war.

The museum houses items from 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 cemetery in Ur. The museum was reopened six months ago after shutting at the beginning of the 1991 Gulf war. It survived airstrikes on Baghdad then and was almost unscathed by the latest attacks on the capital. The problem of looting, at first dismissed as "letting off steam" by Washington, moved several notches up the agenda, partly as a result of the raid on the museum.

Heads of ancient stone now lie on the museum floor. The bodies from which they came have been pockmarked by powerful blows. "They were too heavy to move to the basement, and stood there until the vandals came and laid into them with iron bars," Reda said. It was clear from his description of the frenzy of destruction that these were not professional thieves with an eye on the auction markets of the world but people out for whatever they could get their hands on, and if it was too big to cart away, they smashed it to vent their frustration. Display cases are empty, pottery shards litter the floor. In the vault for archaeological fragments, drawers that once held evidence of Sumerian, Assyrian and Babylonian culture have been pulled out and stripped.