Iraq's National Museum could reopen after 2 years

BAGHDAD (AP) — Iraq's National Museum, which was looted after the U.S. captured Baghdad in 2003, will remain closed to the public for up to two more years until security in the capital is better, the director said Monday.

Director Amira Eidan said that reopening the museum to the public must be the "very last step in Baghdad's journey to absolute normalcy."

"If everything goes well and there are no unexpected developments, then it can reopen after between one and two years from now," Eidan told The Associated Press in an interview in her office at the museum.

The museum, a treasure trove of artifacts from the Stone Age through the Babylonian, Assyrians and Islamic periods, fell victim to bands of armed thieves who smashed glass cases and stole — or sometimes destroyed — their contents.

U.S. troops, the sole power in the city at the time, were intensely criticized for not protecting the museum's priceless collection.

Since then, Iraqi and world culture officials have struggled with limited success to retrieve the treasures looted from the museum, located in central Baghdad.

Up to 7,000 pieces are still missing, including about 40 to 50 considered to be of great historic importance, officials from the U.N. cultural body UNESCO say.

"The looting and destruction reached every part of it," Eidan said of the museum. She spoke after a ceremony launching a $14 million U.S.-Iraqi program that will include renovating the museum and developing galleries and storage facilities.

Iraqi officials had closed the museum several weeks before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, fearing that an attack on the city might embolden criminals to steal the artifacts. Important artifacts were stored at secret locations away from the museum and were spared the looting.

That the museum remains closed nearly six years later underlines the fragility of the security gains over the past year in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq.

Eidan, an archaeologist who took over the museum in 2005, said the city needs more security before she will feel confident enough to open the doors to the public.

"The museum, when it opens, should be for everyone," she said. "But visiting museums and art galleries is an unaffordable luxury when everyone is burdened by the security situation."

As U.S. and Iraqi officials traveled across central Baghdad for Monday's ceremony, military vehicles blocked roads leading to the museum, where scores of American soldiers kept watch. Iraqi police commandos in SUVs stood guard outside the museum and two helicopters circled above, soaring and dipping over the area.

Ameri announced that the program would establish an institute for conservation and historic preservation. It will work with U.S.-based institutions like the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Md., and the Winterthur-University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation to train archaeologists and museum personnel.

But in a sign of Baghdad's ongoing problems, the institute will be set up in Irbil, the capital of the Kurdish self-ruled region 220 miles north of Baghdad.