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