The looting of the National Museum of Iraq, a repository of treasures from civilization’s first cities and early Islamic culture, could be a catastrophe for world cultural heritage, archaeologists and art experts said on Friday.

“Baghdad is one of the great museums of the world, with irreplaceable material,” said Dr. John Malcolm Russell, a specialist in Mesopotamian archaeology at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston.

Though he and other scholars of antiquities were alarmed by the reports of looting, they were not surprised. They said they feared the next cultural target could be the important museum in Mosul, a northern city that is also in turmoil. The Mosul museum holds many Assyrian artifacts from the nearby Nineveh ruins. NY Times

Russell was choking up at times while interviewed today on NPR. He was elated by comments from Colin Powell he interpreted as an endorsement of the notion that the U.S. has a responsibility to protect and retrieve the antiquities. He was a little defensive when the interviewer asked if one should be upset about art treasures in the face of the enormous human losses, but remained composed and adamant. This is potentially the worst destruction of antiquities since the burning of the fabled Library at Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, he said, and challenged us to grieve for more than just the loss of life in the Iraqi conflict.

US authorities had been warned that this was coming.

For weeks before the war, archaeologists and other scholars had alerted military planners to the risks of combat, particularly postwar pillage of the country’s antiquities. These include 10,000 sites of ruins with such resonating names as Babylon, Nineveh, Nimrud and Ur.