AP: Looters Ransack Iraq's National Library

[theapportioner]

Looters Ransack Iraq's National Library
56 minutes ago

By CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Looters and arsonists ransacked and gutted Iraq (news - web sites)'s National Library, leaving a smoldering shell Tuesday of precious books turned to ash and a nation's intellectual legacy gone up in smoke.


They also looted and burned Iraq's principal Islamic library nearby, home to priceless old Qurans; last week, thieves swept through the National Museum and stole or smashed treasures that chronicled this region's role as the "cradle of civilization."


"Our national heritage is lost," an angry high school teacher, Haithem Aziz, said as he stood outside the National Library's blackened hulk. "The modern Mongols, the new Mongols did that. The Americans did that. Their agents did that," he said as an explosion boomed in the distance as the war winds down.


The Mongols, led by Genghis Khan's grandson Hulegu, sacked Baghdad in the 13th century. Today, the rumors on the lips of almost all Baghdadis is that the looting that has torn this city apart is led by U.S.-inspired Kuwaitis or other non-Iraqis bent on stripping the city of everything of value.


But outside the gutted Islamic library on the grounds of the Religious Affairs Ministry, the lone looter scampering away was undeniably Iraqi, a grizzled man named Mohamed Salman.


"It was left there, so why leave it?" he asked a reporter as he clung to a thick, red-covered book, a catalog of the library's religious collection. The scene inside was total devastation. Not a recognizable book or manuscript could be seen among the dark ash.


The destruction has drawn condemnation worldwide, with many criticizing U.S.-led coalition forces for failing to prevent or stop the looting, sometimes carried out by whole Iraqi families.


The United Nation's cultural agency and the British Museum announced Tuesday they will send in teams to help restore ransacked museums and artifacts.


Koichiro Matsuura, director-general of the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, called on customs officials, police, art dealers and neighboring countries to block the trading of stolen antiquities.


Among the National Museum's treasures were the tablets with Hammurabi's Code — one of mankind's earliest codes of law. It could not be immediately determined whether the tablets were at the museum when war broke out.


Thieves smashed or pried open row upon row of glass cases at the museum and pilfered or destroyed their contents. Missing were the four millennia-old copper head of an Akkadian king, golden bowls and colossal statues, ancient manuscripts and bejeweled lyres.


The looting and burning — the museum in the northern city of Mosul also was pillaged — has dealt a terrible blow to a society that prides itself on its universities, literature and educated elite.


"I can't express the sorrow I feel. This is not real liberation," said an artist in a wing of the National Library that had been looted but not burned.


The thin, bearded, 41-year-old man, who would not give his name, was going through old bound newspapers and tearing out pages whose artistic drawings appealed to him. "I came yesterday to see the chaos, and when I saw it, I decided to take what I could," he said.


The three-story, tan brick National Library building, dating to 1977, housed all books published in Iraq, including copies of all doctoral theses. It preserved rare old books on Baghdad and the region, historically important books on Arabic linguistics, and antique manuscripts in Arabic that teacher Aziz said were gradually being transformed into printed versions.


"They had manuscripts from the Ottoman and Abbasid periods," Aziz said, referring to dynasties dating back a millennium. "All of them were precious, famous. I feel such grief."


No library officials could be located to detail the loss. Haroun Mohammed, an Iraqi writer based in London, told The Associated Press some old manuscripts had been transferred from the library to a Manuscript House across the Tigris River.





Except for wooden card catalog drawers and a carved-wood service counter which somehow escaped the flames, nothing was left in the National Library's main wing but its charred walls and ceilings, and mounds of ash. The floor on the ground level was still warm from the flames. Long rolls of microfilm littered the courtyard.

"This was the best library in Iraq," said music student Raad Muzahim, 27, standing among piles of paper in the periodical room. "I remember coming as a student. They were hospitable, letting students do their research, write their papers.

Armored vehicles were positioned on the nearby street, manned by U.S. Marines. They did nothing to stop Tuesday's continuing trickle of looters.

[FS]

I was going to say "what kind of looter steals books" but I guess they pretty much destroyed all of it

Fantastic. While the country should be being rebuilt, it's in fact being torn down further.

[theapportioner]

I think the terrorists should get even and ransack the Library of Congress and the National Archives.

[Abcdxxxx]

any way i look at that comment it's moronic. even if meant to be a joke, which i'm not even sure it's meant to be. are you to believe that had saddam fallen to an uprising from within his own people these libraries and antique relics would have been safe? the looting and other mayhem would have happened just the same. it was at the hands of iraqis (or "terrorist" hardeeharhar). i'm concerned too. where on earth are these people going to get their copies of mein kampf now?

[ranxer]

gah and the U.S. mercenaries were ordered to guard the oil ministries but let everything else go.. oops
oh well, we have our priorities.

[theapportioner]

ABC123 -- Now you are really hallucinating. If a gang of robbers escaped from Rikers and looted the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you bet people would blame the thieves. No shit, rightly so. But if the NYPD just stood around and did nothing while the robbers stole the Degas pastels and rare Vermeers, in an instant the Met security, the NYPD, the mayor, hell even the hot dog vendors outside the Met would get shit for it. Heads would roll, and leaders would be held accountable. People would get fired, and sent to prison, if the DA's office and the NYPD weren't so buddy-buddy. Who is the police in Baghdad now? Nominally, the force that existed prior to the conflict. Essentially, the US military, the supreme fighting force in the world, the force that obliterated a government in three weeks. They could have done it, if they cared to.

As for the Smithsonian and NA comment -- any retarded monkey knows that was in sarcasm, and you most certainly do too. What a pathetic attempt at a smear. I could mention something about your book reference, but I'm not going to stoop so low as to suggest that your view on that is dangerously close to the Nazis' view, etc. etc. Pitiful efforts at painting some of us as somehow complicit with terrorism (or for that matter, anti-semitism) is juvenile in the extreme, and any of that garbage directed at me will be summarily ignored from this point on. So don't waste your time with that bullshit.

[Abcdxxxx]

Well isn't that just another display of some political extremist being close minded, throwing their hands up because we don't agree to their simple logic. Boo Hoo.

Hey anyone who thinks some Rikers island prison break story has any relation to the end of a 30 year dictatorship over a population numbering in the tens of millions is INSANE. Some citizens who experienced the abuse first hand would surely tell you Rikers makes living in Iraq let alone an Iraqi prison look like a picnic. You're just loony. You're all full of misguided analogies that go nowhere.

Obviously the US should have protected these locations, and I think it was a mistake to turn the other cheek while the Iraqi people let off some steam. You on the other hand need to take a basket weaving class cause you're a scary little kid.