“Unesco has urged the US and Britain to deploy troops at Iraq’s key archaeological sites and museums to stop widespread looting and destruction. Armed men have been roaming the streets of Baghdad since the city was taken by US troops on Wednesday. A museum guard said that since Thursday, hundreds of looters had carried away artefacts on carts and wheelbarrows. The museum’s deputy director said looters had taken or destroyed 170,000 items of antiquity dating back thousands of years. ‘They were worth billions of dollars,’ she said. ‘The Americans were supposed to protect the museum. If they had just one tank and two soldiers nothing like this would have happened.’”
