27 March 2007

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Four years after the looting of the Iraqi National Museum during the fall of Baghdad, frustrated antiquities experts say untold thousands of Mesopotamian artifacts have been stolen from other vulnerable historical sites across the nation.

Though the museum is now safe - its doors bricked shut and collections entombed behind welded cellar doors - the country’s 12,000 archeological sites are mostly unprotected and the Iraqi government is hard put to stop their plunder.

The longtime former director of the state board of antiquities fled to the United States last August after receiving a death threat. Car bombings and other violence mean the guards who would look after remote sites are often unable to get there.

Concerned and unable to get into the country, Mesopotamia scholars from around the world have been forced to rely on satellite images that show the cratered landscape left by thieves at southern Iraqi sites where important cities once stood nearly 2,000 years ago.

The images show holes as small as a few feet in diameter spreading across sites throughout the autumn of 2003, a pattern that continued in some places through 2005. The destruction appeared to slow in the last satellite photos available in early 2006, but the impact of the damage is clear. "We’re losing an enormous amount," said anthropologist Elizabeth Stone of the State University of New York-Stony Brook, who has studied the satellite imagery. "We look at the sites and say there have to be thousands of objects taken. Perhaps tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of objects."

So far, the loot hasn’t appeared in art galleries or on the black market in anything like the volume in which it appears to have been taken - leaving open the question of where the stolen antiquities have gone.

"Most agree that the bulk of it is in storage somewhere, for whatever reasons," Stone said. "But that it’s been taken is pretty clear. Somewhere there are a lot of warehouses bulging at the seams."

The physical extent of Iraq’s archeological history is enormous, encompassing artifacts at thousands of sites. Evidence going back 11,000 years traces mankind’s earliest farming villages here through the evolution of cities, the invention of the wheel, creation of writing, and codes of law.

The sites are so rich that one of Stone’s research teams uncovered 20,000 ceramic objects at one site in just a few months before the war. In clay pots stuffed like safety deposit boxes, they found wills, lists of who lived in houses, their friends, business dealings - almost everything to do with daily Mesopotamian society.

"When you go anyplace and put your finger in the soil, you will find one of two seas," said former Iraq Minister of Culture Mufeed Mohammed Jawad al-Jaza’iri. "A sea of oil, or a sea of antiquities. Sometimes, you can find them together."

Looting of Iraq’s historical sites began long before the war, reaching into the global black market during the period of United Nations sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s. As the standard of living fell, treasure-hunting groups began selectively targeting historical sites for big, valuable finds.

As the countryside became more lawless and cut off from the capital at the time of the 2003 invasion, the looting grew more concerted and widespread - this time carried out by large, armed bands from nearby towns.

Desperate to stop it and eager to recover artifacts stolen from the national museum, Western experts tried to return to their worksites and re-establish links with Iraqi counterparts. But as security deteriorated, it became harder and harder to do.

"It’s impossible," said McGuire Gibson, a Near East expert with The American Academic Research Institute in Iraq and the University of Chicago. "Everybody’s just sitting and hoping they get in at some point. But it’s not looking good right now."

Soon after the invasion, it required the equivalent of a military expedition to cross the few blocks from the Green Zone to the Iraqi National Museum, said Minneapolis Institute of Arts curator Corine Wegener, an Army reservist tasked by the U.S. military with recovering looted artifacts in Baghdad in 2003.

"I used to drive there in a two-vehicle convoy with a nine millimeter (pistol) in my pocket," she said. "You can’t do that anymore. It just kind of steadily got worse."

For many in the West, the last window into the daily realities of Iraq’s antiquities sector closed last June, when the former director of the Iraqi Museum, Donny George Youkhanna, received a message from Al Qaeda in Iraq calling him an American collaborator and threatening his family. It came in an envelope with a bullet.

Western colleagues viewed George as a partner. He was an expert archeologist and political survivor who could ensure the welcome of international scholarship and major excavations even at the height of the Iran-Iraq war and just after the invasion.

George earned plaudits for recovering about half the 15,000 pieces looted from the museum and other archeological sites as Baghdad fell. He was working to establish a 1,400-member national security force to guard historical sites in June, 2006, when camouflaged cars full of uniformed Iraqis pulled up to a bus station near the museum. Uniformed gunmen kidnapped nearly 50 people.

George called a meeting of the museum’s senior staff. "I asked them one question: `If these people come to the museum and want to go into our storerooms, can we stop them?’"

The answer was no. Within two days, they pulled everything off display, boxed them in the museum’s cellar and welded iron gates over the doors. He had workers brick up the entrances. George left the country last August when Iraq’s current ministers of culture and tourism cut his authority to undertake new projects, leading him to question the interest of Iraq’s religious Shiite officials in the country’s non-Islamic past. He now teaches at SUNY-Stony Brook.

His replacement at the state board of antiquities, Abbas al-Husseiny, declined to comment. Other archeological experts say that Husseiny is ambitious, cooperative and knowledgeable about Iraq’s past, but that his hands are tied by the security situation and relative newcomers in the ministries above him.

The person with the fullest picture of what is missing is Stone, who had been collecting Digital Globe satellite images since 2001.

The pictures were enough for her to compile statistics on the extent of looting of historical sites in southern Iraq. Between 49 and 60 percent of sites dating to 1900 BC had been looted, Stone found. About 155 million square feet of ground at the sites were affected, with a quarter of that total surface gone.

At sites dating to 1700 BC, 63 percent of sites were looted, with 84 million square feet of ground torn up and some 30 million square feet of the surface missing entirely.

There is an additional fear: that locals are trying to hold valuable artifacts to sell later. After brief exposure to sun and open air, many of Mesopotamia’s clay artifacts, particularly cuneiform tablets, quickly decompose and therefore could be lost forever.

If that is the case, "a huge amount of Mesopotamia is turning to dust," Stone said.