Who's to Blame for Iraq Museum Looting?

April 19 -- It was the most important museum, housing the most important artifacts, in one of the richest archaeological regions in the world.

Archaeologists say civilization began in Iraq — in a region known as Mesopotamia 6,000 years ago. This is where cities, writing, agriculture, social traditions and art all began. And in the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad, people could view artifacts from all of these developments. There were ancient scripts on clay tablets, primitive plows, even one of the first wheels.

Now they are gone — or at least an untold number of them, from prehistoric tools to 4,000-year-old pottery, to Islamic art — stolen by gangs of thieves or damaged by looters.

Heartbroken Over History

Scholars around the world warned the Pentagon of the museum's significance. Now, they are angry and heartbroken.

"I thought we made the case enough with the military that the museum was going to be the No.1 protected site in Iraq," said McGuire Gibson, an archeologist at the University of Chicago. "And I had been part of a group that had worked up a series of locations for over 5,000 sites."

Gibson said the losses go beyond the Iraq National Museum's own holdings to include artifacts brought in from other parts of the country. Some Iraqi curators believed the artifacts would be safest in Baghdad.

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"The fact there … were soldiers about 100 yards away while the looting was taking place for two days was shocking and was just indescribable and maddening," said Gibson, who is president of the American Association for Research in Baghdad and the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute.

The reverberations are worldwide. Three members of a White House cultural committee resigned Thursday out of disappointment that the United States failed to protect Iraq's historical treasures.

And Irving Finkle, a curator with the British museum, said he was "devastated."

"It was like being hit in the stomach with one of those iron bars. I could not believe in this day and age, such a thing would happen," he said.