Twenty years after the US invasion, where are Iraq’s antiquities?

   Western Asiatic Antiquities: 1970s advertising  
 Poster by Ainslie Yule (1941–2022) 

Readers who have been around this blog in its early days may remember the protests of US dealers and their lobbyists (Dave Welsh, Wayne Sales, Peter Tompa, all of them and their ilk) that "no" Iraqi antiquities entered the US market after the US led invasion. They got quite nasty about it when you challenged their dogmatic but unsupported statements. Now, they've gone sullenly silent and we know (Adel Fakhir, 'Twenty years after the US invasion, where are Iraq’s antiquities?' Al Jazeera, 7 Apr 2023).

Hakim al-Shammari, media director of the General Authority for Antiquities and Heritage at the Iraqi Ministry of Culture, says that efforts to recover stolen antiquities continue.[...] “Iraq has managed in recent years to recover about 17,000 artefacts from the United States, and 364 from Lebanon,” said al-Shammari, who estimates that the total number of looted antiquities is in the thousands. “Work is under way to recover antiquities in France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran and Jordan, which are different and various.” [...] The Baghdad office of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) told Al Jazeera that it was working with the Iraqi government to recover more than 40,000 artefacts scattered and dispersed around the world, in addition to 30,000 pieces that had already been recovered between 2017 and 2022. Other items are being kept in Iraqi embassies and antiquity loan centres around the world until suitable storage centres can be found in Iraq.

For the US antiquities market, a major problem is the way US troops invading Iraq (exactly in the same way as Russia is invading Ukraine right now, for similar stated reasons) neglected the issue of antiquities. Al Jazeera writes:

Lack of US protection
For many Iraqis, a lot of the blame for the loss of so many pieces of their country’s history lies with the US.

At the time of the invasion, US officials were reported to have been frustrated at the lack of willingness from the military generals to protect archeological sites, such as the Iraq National Museum.

Amer Abdul-Razzaq, an archaeological researcher, says the negligence was deliberate.  “American tanks surrounded the Iraqi Museum during the occupation and chaos, but they did not move a finger in the face of the mafias and antiquities thieves who attacked the museum and stole about 14,000 valuable pieces from it,” Abdul-Razzaq, who previously served as the director of antiquities in the Iraqi province of Dhi Qar, said.

“Although the US army was later committed to protecting Iraqi antiquities due to pressure from Iraqi archaeological institutions, it initially took archaeological sites as bases and camps, including in the city of Ur in Dhi Qar province, and they placed their heavy military equipment in the Ziggurat of Ur,” Abdul-Razzaq said, referring to the ancient Sumerian city-state and its famous monument.

“The American army turned the ancient city of Babylon into a military base, to the extent that they made earthen mounds of soil, and some of it was made from parts of the clay cuneiform figure,” Abdul-Razzaq added. “It is the same with the city of Nimrud in Mosul and other archaeological sites across the country.”

And while the US has already sent thousands of artefacts back to Iraq, Abdul-Razzaq believes it is still not enough. 

“What was recovered is small. There are pieces still sold in auctions in the US and Britain, and in other countries,” Abdul-Razzaq said. “We need greater diplomatic efforts and international cooperation.”

It is interesting how the opponents of the War in the west immediately seized upon the issue of the treatment of antiquities in a way that (I think I am right in saying) we had not seen before and blew it into a huge political issue. One that the US is still working hard to play down and to avoid a repetition, but also one that the US government has itself weaponised as an instrument of soft power and a justification of hard power too (most notably in the case of ISIS). 

\