Baghdad, The Minister of Culture, Tourism and Antiquities, Ahmed Fakak Al-Badrani, discussed with the US Ambassador Alina Romanowski the recovery of smuggled Iraqi antiquities in the United States and the Iraqi National Archives.
The ministry stated in a statement, ‘Al-Badrani stressed, during his meeting with the US Ambassador to Baghdad, Alina Romanowski, the necessity of Washington setting a specific date for the return of the National Archives, which the United States took out in 2004 for maintenance and rehabilitation purposes, noting that the date set for its return was in the year 2006, and this date was postponed.’
The Ministry requested the reopening of the Iraqi Cultural Center in Washington, and coordination to do so during the scheduled visit of Prime Minister Muhammad Shiaa al-Sudani to Washington.
Al-Badrani urged the US ambassador to make efforts to help Baghdad in various projects, including the virtual museum and tourism consultations, and to follow up on the work of the American excavatio
n missions in Ur, Babylon, Nimrud, and Diwaniyah, and to recover several important archaeological pieces, including 13 skeletons belonging to Assyrian fighters from Nimrud, which had arrived in the Iraqi Consulate in Los Angeles.
In turn, Romanowski expressed the US Embassy’s readiness to cooperate in everything that serves the Iraqi cultural movement and the rehabilitation of archaeological sites.
She explained that the cultural and judicial attachés at the embassy will continue their efforts in the field of recovering antiquities, examples of which are located in one of the American states, which the CIA had seized after smuggling earlier, and they need Iraqi archaeological experts to confirm their return to the Mesopotamian civilization.
Source: National Iraqi News Agency