The Wall Street Journal ran a condensed version of a briefing by the officer in charge of investigating the looting of the Iraq National Museum (long version complete with slides used is available at DefenseLINK). Roughly 13,500 items were stolen; about 3,500 of those have been recovered. While that sounds like a lot, most of the items were small – over 10,000 were taken from a single basement storage area and could fit in a single, large backpack. Some of the items were huge – one statue weighed over 300 pounds. Numbers alone don’t tell the story.
There were random looters who grabbed what they could, professionals who knew what was worth stealing, and one group that knew the museum and where to find keys to the basement storage vaults. Fortunately, they dropped the keys, lost them in the extensive litter, and then had to flee from the smoke of the fire they started looking for the keys. They recovered fingerprints off of these guys which didn’t match any of the staff who have returned (or US soldiers). And yes, the museum was used as a fighting position during the war.
A lot of items (over 1,700) were turned in by ordinary Iraqi’s – most of whom wanted to be clear that they were turning them into the American’s soldiers for safekeeping until a new government came to power because the old museum staff was too closely identified with the Baath Party. Interesting stuff. Oh yeah, the person arrested most recently over this was a journalist entering the US with 3 of the cylinder seals that were stolen.
