LONDON, 21 April 2003 — The US Army ignored pleas from its own advisers to take measures against the looting that has wrecked Baghdad’s once priceless collection of ancient artifacts, the Observer newspaper reported yesterday.
The paper cited a memo by the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) for postwar Iraq as saying that the National Archeological Museum in Baghdad was a “prime target for looters” and should have been the second priority for securing by coalition troops after the national bank.
The ORHA, the US administration set up to oversee the rebuilding of Iraq, warned that the looting of the museum could mean the “irreparable loss of cultural treasures of enormous importance to all humanity.”
However, anarchic looting that followed the fall of Baghdad saw the museum lose at least 200,000 artifacts, many of which came from the Mesopotamian civilization.
“We asked for just a few soldiers at each building, or if they feared snipers then just one or two tanks,” one ORHA official was cited by the paper as saying.
“The tanks were doing nothing once they got inside the city yet the generals refused to deploy them and look what happened,” the official added.
The paper said Jay Garner, the retired US general who is to head the interim administration for Iraq, was “livid” after the looting took place.
It said that ORHA submitted documents to senior generals on March 26 listing 16 institutions, with the bank ranked first and the museum second, that merited securing “as soon as possible” by troops to prevent looting.
The paper that the Oil Ministry, which has been carefully guarded by US troops since the fall of Baghdad, was only number 16 on the list. “It’s a tragedy and disaster for our image and for rebuilding Iraq,” one ORHA official told the paper.
Meanwhile, hundreds of people fleeing Iraq have poured into a no man’s land on the Jordanian border, swelling the numbers of those stranded there to over 1,000, the UN’s refugee agency said yesterday.
“There are now over 1,000 people in the no man’s land requesting entry into refugee camps in Jordan, with the arrival Saturday of 450 people fleeing armed groups and 100 others on Sunday,” UNHCR spokesman Peter Kessler said.
