90% of Iraqi National Library reported safe

I have not posted much lately on the looting of Baghdad's museums and libraries, though a summary of what is currently known and a rundown of the key players is overdue. At least in part, the delay has been due to the steady trickle of news contradicting earlier reports, the latest of which appears in the
Boston Globe:

Inside a cavernous room at the Al Hak Mosque in the newly named Revolution City, roughly 400,000 manuscripts, biographies, religious works, and graduate-school theses are stacked to the 12-foot ceiling and gathering dust in the dry, 95-degree heat. . .

''We had to protect the Islamic and Arabic heritage, so we acted before Baghdad fell to chaos,'' said Mohammad al-Jawad al-Tamimi, the mosque's imam. ''These books, it concerns the whole country''. . .

''We have about 30 percent of the library holdings, and another 60 percent are hidden [at the library] and elsewhere,'' said the sheik's brother, Mahmoud al-Tamimi. ''We brought them all here to protect our past from thieves". . .

Librarians say that as American troops pressed into Baghdad April 9, they pleaded with soldiers to protect the site from looters and Kuwaiti arsonists. They said the Kuwaitis were bent on revenge for the 1990-91 invasion and war. But the troops were involved with the business of the day, toppling Saddam Hussein's regime.

The library staff then turned to mosques, Mahmoud Tamimi said, and came to him. Tamimi and his family began working with Hawza -- Shi'ite leaders who loosely coordinate city and regional religious affairs -- to recruit volunteers to protect the library. On April 10, teams of men began moving library shelves at random into trucks belonging to neighbors of Tamimi's mosque 8 miles away. ''No one tried to stop us,'' Tamimi said.

The work continued for four days, until the arsonists appeared. Other books and artifacts were hidden elsewhere on site, and library workers believe that at least some of those items survived the fire and looting.

The story sounds plausible, though I will have to look into these allegations of Kuwaiti arsonists seeking revenge. Offhand, it sounds rather implausible, though a more comfortable explanation for Iraqis than admission that their fellow citizens wielded the torch.

Posted by David on May 15, 2003 4:57 PM