Baghdad, Iraq - April 2003
The chaos and current situation of Iraq has led to
the loss of valuable artifacts dating back thousands of years... The
museum staff 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."
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