The Washington Post reports that we’re making some progress in getting back the booty looted from the museum in Baghdad by Iraqis last week:
Officials are also using tips from citizens to hunt down stolen items, and trying to prevail on thieves to turn them in voluntarily. Muslim clerics, at the officials’ urging, have announced over mosque loudspeakers that anyone with looted items should return them to museum curators, no questions asked. U.S. reconstruction officials said they plan to air similar messages on Iraqi radio stations starting tonight.
“It’s already working,” said John Limbert, the U.S. ambassador to Mauritania, who is serving as adviser to Iraq’s Culture Ministry for the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, the U.S. postwar agency for Iraq. “I’ve heard from our friends that a number of objects were collected in mosques in the neighborhood after appeals from the imams of the mosques.”
Some was explicitly taken for safekeeping by museum staff, as they’re trained to do.