Looters pillaging Iraq's vast `sea of antiquities'

Four years after the looting of the Iraqi National Museum during the fall of Baghdad, frustrated antiquities experts say untold thousands of Mesopotamian artifacts have been stolen from other vulnerable historical sites across the nation.

Though the museum is now safe--its doors bricked shut and collections entombed behind welded cellar doors--the country's 12,000 archeological sites are mostly unprotected and the Iraqi government is hard-pressed to stop their plunder....

Concerned and unable to get into the country, Mesopotamia scholars from around the world have been forced to rely on satellite images that show the cratered landscape left by thieves at southern Iraqi sites where important cities once stood nearly 2,000 years ago.

The images show holes as small as a few feet in diameter spreading across sites throughout the autumn of 2003, a pattern that continued in some places through 2005. The destruction appeared to slow in the last satellite photos available, in early 2006, but the impact of the damage is clear.