Shafaq News-Al-Anbar
530archaeological artifacts are heading home to Al-Anbar province, in westernIraq, after decades in Baghdad storage, as the Al-Anbar Cultural Museum inRamadi completes final preparations for its public reopening.
Ammar AliHamadi, the museum's director, told Shafaq News on Monday that the collectionspans pieces excavated from provincial sites during the 1970s and 1980s,alongside artifacts representing Iraq's civilizations. The pieces were moved tothe National Museum in Baghdad in the 1990s for safekeeping amid securitythreats, and have remained there since.
The provincialcouncil has procured additional security equipment, including inspectioncabinets and expanded CCTV coverage, while the National Museum's specializedcommittees will oversee conservation of the returned collection, Hamadi added.
Many piecesoriginate from the ancient city of Eita near modern-day Hit, a settlementdating back over 7,000 years, with additional items spanning Sumerian,Babylonian, Akkadian, and Islamic eras. The museum previously housedmanuscripts, pottery, gold and silver artifacts, and Abbasid-era relics.
ISIS occupiedAl-Anbar in 2014, leaving the Museum with over 50% of its structure destroyedthrough the occupation and the military operations that followed, making it oneof the most heavily damaged cultural institutions in the province. The groupalso sold many artifacts to finance its operations.
Arehabilitation project launched in 2023 contracted a firm that has sincecompleted the restoration work. Hamadi confirmed that no original artifactswere lost during that period; items that went missing were non-originalreplicas carrying no archaeological value, with the entire original collectionhaving remained secured in Baghdad throughout.
