Inside the hunt for Iraq's looted treasures
Deep in the back offices of Iraq’s National Museum in Baghdad, at the end of a long corridor set away from the Babylonian obelisks and Assyrian winged bulls, an international treasure hunt is under way.
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Wafaa Hassan is sitting at her desk, poring over a large stack of papers, sighing as she turns each page. She holds in her hands a catalogue of ancient relics that were originally discovered in Iraq, and are now scattered across the world.
“They are in the US, Britain, Switzerland, Lebanon, the UAE, Spain, everywhere,” she says. “They belong to us, and we are trying very hard to get them all back.”
Hassan is both archaeologist and detective. As the head of the museum’s recovery department, she is responsible for finding and repatriating the tens of thousands of artefacts that have been plundered from Iraq and spirited away to museums and private collections.
The trade and recovery of Iraq’s antiquities is a cat-and-mouse game that has been going on for decades. The country’s borders contain what is perhaps the most important archaeological region in the world. Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, is where civilisation was born – where the first cities were built, the first words were written and the first empires rose and fell.
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A replica of the Code of Hammurabi, one of the earliest code of laws ever written. The laws were created by the Babylonian king Hammurabi around 1754BC. The original is housed in the Louvre (Richard Hall/The Independent)
But war and instability made it easy pickings for looters. European archaeologists routinely transported their finds back to their home countries during the early part of the 20th century. Illegal digging was common under former president Saddam Hussein, especially after the first Gulf War. But it was only after the US-led invasion in 2003, and the chaos it brought, that the floodgates opened.
On 10 April, 2003, after Iraqi soldiers fled and before US troops arrived to protect it, the National Museum – where Hassan works – was looted from top to bottom. More than 15,000 items were stolen – from tiny cylinder seals to the headless statue of the Sumerian king Entemena. It is considered to be one of the greatest crimes ever committed against cultural heritage.
“It made me so sad,” Hassan says of that day. “So many people got inside. It was totally destroyed.”
The museum reopened in 2015, a shadow of its former self. But even as it took its first steps to recovery, another disaster had struck. In 2014, Isis took over a third of the country – including thousands of archaeological sites and museums. The group’s strict interpretation of Islam forbids the veneration of statues and tombs. It destroyed many priceless statues and smuggled the rest to fund its reign of terror. At the height of its power, it was estimated to be making £80m a year through the sale of stolen antiquities on the black market.
Hassan’s passion for her country’s historic relics is more than equal to the extremists’ hatred for them. She strides through the museum’s halls twice a day, stopping to talk to visitors and explain each of the exhibits in as much detail as they will let her. As she sees it, every tablet and every cylinder taken from the ground in Iraq belongs in these halls.
“We are a country with a rich history, so many ancient people lived here. If you go to Babylon, the ground is full of archaeological pieces, like flowers. But so much is missing,” she says.
On the wall behind her desk is a poster with the words “Red List” in giant letters. On it are dozens of pictures of missing items that she is trying to find. Among them is a clay tablet with cuneiform writing from the ancient Sumerian city of Uruk, dated around 3500BC, and a cylinder with the name of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal from Babylon, 7th century BC.
Hassan and her team of seven treasure hunters scour the internet for signs of Mesopotamian loot. Each item they find requires a different approach. For those held in museums in foreign capitals, diplomacy is used. Retrieving items from private collectors is a different story.
“The most important thing is the auctions,” she says. “We look at what is being sold, and when we find something, we fight very hard to get it back.”