>>> The following are news reports concerning the destruction and looting of irreplaceable books and other documents in Iraq's National Library and Archives, along with the library of the Ministry of Religious Endowment, which took place 14 April 2003.

Please send me other articles on this cultural atrocity, as well as any information on exactly what material was in these two libraries. I'd like to create a catalog of what has been lost.

Library Books, Letters and Priceless Documents Are Set Ablaze in Final Chapter of the Sacking of Baghdad
Robert Fisk
Independent (London), 15 April 2003

So yesterday was the burning of books. First came the looters, then the arsonists. It was the final chapter in the sacking of Baghdad. The National Library and Archives ­ a priceless treasure of Ottoman historical documents, including the old royal archives of Iraq ­ were turned to ashes in 3,000 degrees of heat. Then the library of Korans at the Ministry of Religious Endowment was set ablaze.

I saw the looters. One of them cursed me when I tried to reclaim a book of Islamic law from a boy of no more than 10. Amid the ashes of Iraqi history, I found a file blowing in the wind outside: pages of handwritten letters between the court of Sharif Hussein of Mecca, who started the Arab revolt against the Turks for Lawrence of Arabia, and the Ottoman rulers of Baghdad.

And the Americans did nothing. All over the filthy yard they blew, letters of recommendation to the courts of Arabia, demands for ammunition for troops, reports on the theft of camels and attacks on pilgrims, all in delicate hand-written Arabic script. I was holding in my hands the last Baghdad vestiges of Iraq's written history. But for Iraq, this is Year Zero; with the destruction of the antiquities in the Museum of Archaeology on Saturday and the burning of the National Archives and then the Koranic library, the cultural identity of Iraq is being erased. Why? Who set these fires? For what insane purpose is this heritage being destroyed?

When I caught sight of the Koranic library burning ­ flames 100 feet high were bursting from the windows ­ I raced to the offices of the occupying power, the US Marines' Civil Affairs Bureau. An officer shouted to a colleague that "this guy says some biblical [sic] library is on fire". I gave the map location, the precise name ­ in Arabic and English. I said the smoke could be seen from three miles away and it would take only five minutes to drive there. Half an hour later, there wasn't an American at the scene ­ and the flames were shooting 200 feet into the air.

There was a time when the Arabs said that their books were written in Cairo, printed in Beirut and read in Baghdad. Now they burn libraries in Baghdad. In the National Archives were not just the Ottoman records of the Caliphate, but even the dark years of the country's modern history, handwritten accounts of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, with personal photographs and military diaries,and microfiche copies of Arabic newspapers going back to the early 1900s.

But the older files and archives were on the upper floors of the library where petrol must have been used to set fire so expertly to the building. The heat was such that the marble flooring had buckled upwards and the concrete stairs that I climbedhad been cracked.

The papers on the floor were almost too hot to touch, bore no print or writing, and crumbled into ash the moment I picked them up. Again, standing in this shroud of blue smoke and embers, I asked the same question: why?

So, as an all-too-painful reflection on what this means, let me quote from the shreds of paper that I found on the road outside, blowing in the wind, written by long-dead men who wrote to the Sublime Porte in Istanbul or to the Court of Sharif of Mecca with expressions of loyalty and who signed themselves "your slave". There was a request to protect a camel convoy of tea, rice and sugar, signed by Husni Attiya al-Hijazi (recommending Abdul Ghani-Naim and Ahmed Kindi as honest merchants), a request for perfume and advice from Jaber al-Ayashi of the royal court of Sharif Hussein to Baghdad to warn of robbers in the desert. "This is just to give you our advice for which you will be highly rewarded," Ayashi says. "If you don't take our advice, then we have warned you." A touch of Saddam there, I thought. The date was 1912.

Some of the documents list the cost of bullets, military horses and artillery for Ottoman armies in Baghdad and Arabia, others record the opening of the first telephone exchange in the Hejaz ­ soon to be Saudi Arabia ­ while one recounts, from the village of Azrak in modern-day Jordan, the theft of clothes from a camel train by Ali bin Kassem, who attacked his interrogators "with a knife and tried to stab them but was restrained and later bought off". There is a 19th-century letter of recommendation for a merchant, Yahyia Messoudi, "a man of the highest morals, of good conduct and who works with the [Ottoman] government." This, in other words, was the tapestry of Arab history ­ all that is left of it, which fell into The Independent's hands as the mass of documents crackled in the immense heat of the ruins.

King Faisal of the Hejaz, the ruler of Mecca, whose staff are the authors of many of the letters I saved, was later deposed by the Saudis. His son Faisel became king of Iraq ­ Winston Churchill gave him Baghdad after the French threw him out of Damascus ­ and his brother Abdullah became the first king of Jordan, the father of King Hussein and the grandfather of the present-day Jordanian monarch, King Abdullah II.

For almost a thousand years, Baghdad was the cultural capital of the Arab world, the most literate population in the Middle East. Genghis Khan's grandson burnt the city in the 13th century and, so it was said, the Tigris river ran black with the ink of books. Yesterday, the black ashes of thousands of ancient documents filled the skies of Iraq. Why?

Looters Ransack Iraq's National Library
Charles J. Hanley
Associated Press, Tuesday, April 15, 2003 · Last updated 12:30 p.m. PT

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Looters and arsonists ransacked and gutted Iraq'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.

As flames engulfed Baghdad's National Library yesterday, destroying manuscripts many centuries old, the Pentagon admitted that it had been caught unprepared by the widespread looting of antiquities, despite months of warnings from American archaeologists.
But defence department officials denied accusations by British archaeologists that the US government was succumbing to pressure from private collectors in America to allow plundered Iraqi treasures to be traded on the open market.

Almost nothing remains of the library's archive of tens of thousands of manuscripts, books, and Iraqi newspapers, according to reports from the scene.

It joins a list that already includes the capital's National Museum, one of the world's most important troves of artefacts from the ancient Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian civilisations.

Calling the looting of historical artefacts "a catastrophe for the cultural heritage of Iraq", Mounir Bouchenaki, the deputy director-general of the UN cultural body Unesco, announced an emergency summit of archaeologists in Paris on Thursday.

In Washington Colin Powell, the secretary of state, said the US "will be working with a number of individuals and organisations to not only secure the facility, but to recover that which has been taken, and also to participate in restoring that which has been broken _ the United States understands its obligations and will be taking a leading role with respect to antiquities in general, but [the museum] in particular".

A Pentagon official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said no plans had been made to protect antiquities from looters, as opposed to ensuring that historical sites were not caught up in the fighting itself.

But the official rejected charges in a letter from nine British archaeologists, published in the Guardian yesterday, that private collectors were "persuading the Pentagon to relax legislation that protects Iraq's heritage by prevention of sales abroad".

The American Council for Cultural Policy, a New York-based coalition of about 60 collectors, dealers and others, had received "no special treatment," the official insisted, despite reports that members of the group met with Bush administration representatives in January to argue that a post-Saddam Iraq should have relaxed antiquities laws.

Last night the group denied that it was lobbying for plundered Iraqi treasures to be traded. "The ACCP will seek _ to find ways to shut off the import of objects that may have been taken from Iraq, and to close the domestic market in such material," Ashton Hawkins, the organisation's president, said.

John Henry Merryman, a law professor at Stanford University and a member of the ACCP, said allowing a private trade in the artefacts would better protect them until they could be returned to Iraq at a later date.

Prized Iraqi Annals 'Lost in Blaze'
BBC News , 14 April 2003

Almost all of the contents of Iraq's national library and archives are reported to have been destroyed by fire, meaning the loss of priceless records of the country's history.

The library, in central Baghdad, housed several rare volumes, including entire royal court records and files from the period when Iraq was part of the Ottoman Empire.

It is unclear who started the fires - though widespread looting has taken place in the Iraqi capital, with the city's museum also ransacked and many rare artefacts damaged, destroyed or stolen.

The US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, has pledged to recover and repair the antiquities looted from the city museum, amid criticism from heritage bodies that the damage should have been prevented.

Patrols begin

A Western journalist - Robert Fisk of the Independent - reporting from the site of the library told the BBC that the whole building had been gutted, with handwritten documents from as far back as the 16th century - when Iraq was part of the Ottoman Empire - strewn on the ground.

A nearby Islamic library has also gone in up in flames, he said, destroying valuable literature including one of the oldest surviving copies of the Koran.

US-Iraqi joint patrols have now begun around the city in a bid to curb the violence.

Several Shia religious leaders have appealed to the local population to return looted items, and say that some items had been returned and stashed in mosques for safekeeping.

"We will return them when we will have a democratic government," Shia cleric Sayyad Ali al-Shawki told the Associated Press news agency.

Mr Powell called the ravaged Baghdad museum "one of the great museums in the world" and said the US would take a leading role in restoring it.

Leading experts on Iraqi heritage will gather for an emergency meeting on Thursday to count the cost of the looting of the country's cultural sites.

'Recover and restore'

Mr Powell said the US would secure the museum and would work with organisations such as the European Union and the cultural arm of the United Nations, Unesco, in restoring it.

The US would "recover that which has been taken and also participate in restoring that which has been broken", he said.

But the loss and destruction already suffered has been described as "a disaster" by Unesco.

The national museum was home to artefacts that dated back 10,000 years, from one of the world's earliest civilisations.

The development of writing, abstract counting, the wheel and agriculture were all charted in its exhibitions.

The collections from the Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian periods were particularly prized.

'History of mankind'

Despite Mr Powell's assurances, there are fears that many objects may have been be lost forever.

After the 1991 Gulf War, 4,000 pieces disappeared when regional museums were looted.

Donny George, archaeologist at the museum, said: "It was the leading collection of a... continuous history of mankind.

"And it's gone, and it's lost. If marines had started before, none of this would have happened.

"It's too late, it's no use, it's no use."

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