Iraq Museum gutted – the loss is shared by our planet
Posted in Miscellaneous on April 14th 2003 by Randy Reichardt¦¦ I’ve already mentioned my concerns about the looting of the library at the Basra Polytechnic College. The gutting and pillaging of the Iraq Museum of Antiquities has me seething. It took ten years to reopen the museum after the Gulf War in 1991, and now, two years later, it lies in ruins. When you read a little about what the museum held, you realize that what has happened rivals the destruction of the library at Alexandria. An estimated 170,000 items were destroyed or stolen! Where were the American troops (see next paragraph)? The responsibility for this sits squarely on their shoulders. The observation of this Al-Jazeera reporter says it best: “When mobs in Baghdad entered the Iraqi national museum and destroyed the artifacts, little did they know that they were wiping out large traces of history. Not just of Iraq, but that of the entire world.”
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