By the time Asif Mohammed turned up for work yesterday morning, the ancient contents of Mosul’s museum had vanished. The looters knew what they were looking for, and in less than 10 minutes had walked off with several million dollars worth of Parthian sculpture.
The 2 000-year-old statue of King Saqnatroq II — one of Iraq’s forgotten monarchs — had disappeared from its cabinet. Lying on the glass-strewn floor were the remains of several mythical birds and an Athenian goddess, apparently broken by the looters as they made their escape.
”Iraq has a great history,” Mohammed, the museum’s curator, said yesterday, just hours after Mosul, Iraq’s third largest city was officially ”liberated”.
”It’s just been wrecked. I’m extremely angry. We used to have American and British tourists who visited this museum. I want to know whether the Americans accept this.”
It was a good question. Unfortunately, as Mosul descended yesterday into a hellish self-feeding chaos, there were no American troops to ask.
The Pentagon had earlier promised that thousands of its soldiers would secure Mosul — a pleasant city of 1 million on the banks of the Tigris — and prevent the kind of mass looting seen elsewhere in Iraq. They would also keep out the Kurds.
Since the embarrassing invasion of Kirkuk two days ago by Kurdish peshmerga, the White House had been keen to reassure the world — and Turkey in particular — that it was in charge of northern Iraq. The Kurds would do nothing without US supervision, Washington soothed Ankara.
Yesterday it was abundantly clear this was not true. A quick tour of central Mosul revealed there were no American troops there at all. Several thousand were stationed just down the road in Irbil, inside Kurdish-northern Iraq, but they had failed to arrive.
The Iraqi government abandoned Mosul late on Thursday night. Just as in Kirkuk, Iraqi soldiers garrisoned in the city took off their uniforms and simply drifted away. Overnight American special forces entered briefly with groups of Kurdish peshmerga. The Americans then disappeared.
By midday yesterday — as Kalashnikov fire echoed around Mosul’s looted central bank — they still hadn’t come back. A huge crowd was trying to help itself to piles of Iraqi dinar. Fights were breaking out. Kurdish fighters were shooting wildly into the air. Nearby, looters were ransacking Mosul’s former seat of power, its imposing governorate building, sending glass cascading into the street.
However, last night a US special operations team met Mosul’s tribal and community leaders in an attempt to put an end to the unrest. Colonel Walter Meyer told the group that US soldiers were being redeployed there from the Kurdish cities of Arbil, Dohuk and Akra.
Across the city fires burned from ruined government offices. ”I beg you to stop these terrible things,” Mufti Mohammed, one of Mosul’s leading Sunni clerics, said yesterday, as dozens of worshippers, furious at the self-destruction of their city, poured out of his mosque after Friday prayers. ”If some kind of order is not restored in the next 24 hours we’re going to take things into our own hands. We will start up our own armed groups to keep the peace.”
Mohammed said he had persuaded the Fedayeen and Arab volunteers still in the city not to fight coalition soldiers. Now he wished he hadn’t bothered. ”This is anarchy,” he said.
Other residents were angry. ”Why don’t the American troops enter this city? I’ve spent all morning looking for them,” said Ali Sahif, a 34-year-old engineering student. ”Everything is being ripped apart.” Sahif said looters had wrecked his engineering institute, as well as Mosul University, the hospital and the College of Medicine. He now wasn’t sure what to do.
Most of the murals of Saddam, meanwhile, had not been damaged or defaced. Perhaps people wanted him back, or at least the stability he represented.
Either way, three days after the fall of Baghdad, it was clear that the honeymoon between the Iraqi people and their British and American liberators was turning sour.
Mosul has traditionally been one of Iraq’s most ethnically mixed cities. Arabs, Syriac people, Armenians, Kurds, Turkomans, Christians and Yazedis — an esoteric Muslim sect who refuse to wear blue — all call Mosul home. But in the end it was Kurdish fighters who poured into Mosul yesterday, to an enthusiastic welcome from the city’s Kurds, but a more muted one from everyone else.
Their presence in Mosul and Kirkuk has not pleased Turkey, now incandescent at the prospect of a vast de facto Kurdish state on its doorstep.
The fighters from the Irbil-based Kurdistan Democratic party had been given orders to defend several key buildings, including the Mosul Museum, with its priceless Assyrian antiquities. They didn’t manage to get there in time, although they did secure the natural history museum a short walk away. A Kurdish com mander, Wahid Majid, proudly showed me the dusty toucans and pickled reptiles he had just saved from the mob. The museum’s stuffed brown bear was still safely in its display case, he pointed out. ”We have not allowed anybody to take anything. We were told to defend the museum and other important establishments.”
Had he seen the Americans? ”They were here earlier but they were unable to control the situation so they left,” he said.
On the other bank of the Tigris, looters were demolishing Mosul’s only five-star hotel, the ziggurat-shaped Nineveh International. It was perhaps a legitimate target: until yesterday an entire wing had been reserved for senior members of the Ba’ath party. Most ordinary Iraqis were too scruffy to venture inside, let alone afford its £16-a-night rooms.
Yesterday they removed all the hotel’s bedding and furniture instead. ”It is our money. It is our money,” 17-year-old Hassan Ali explained. ”This hotel has been built with money from Iraq’s oil. The oil belongs to us. That’s why we are looting.”
To begin with, the mass collective stealing was good-humoured and democratic, with all of Mosul’s different groups taking part. But as dusk set in, the beginnings of what looked like ethnic collapse were all too apparent as Kurds and Arabs wrangled about who owned what. Iraq is a large country with ancient fault lines. Unless coalition forces began to restore order it is in danger of disintegrating.
Back at the Mosul Museum, Mohammed sat next to two giant Assyrian winged friezes, similar to a pair in the British Museum, themselves looted by 19th-century British archaeologists from nearby Nineveh. The friezes had clearly been too heavy for anybody to cart off.
”I watched Kofi Annan appear on TV,” he said. ”He said that Iraq had a very great history and civilisation. I’m very sad at what has happened here. I feel pain in my heart.” Mohammed recalled that he had had his photo taken with an elderly American tourist who visited. What did he think of Americans now? ”I think George Bush and Tony Blair are war criminals.” – Guardian Unlimited Â