casualties of war
16 April 2003 17:20![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
juldeaThis makes me cry:
Among other buildings afire or still smoldering in eastern Baghdad today were the city hall, the Agriculture Ministry and — so thoroughly burned that heat still radiated 50 paces from its front doors — the National Library. Not far from the National Museum of Iraq, which was looted on Thursday and Friday with the loss of almost all of its store of 170,000 artifacts, the library was considered another of the repositories of an Iraqi civilization dating back at least 7,000 years.
By tonight, virtually nothing was left of the library and its tens of thousands of old manuscripts and books, and of archives like Iraqi newspapers tracing the country's turbulent history from the era of Ottoman rule through to Mr. Hussein. Reading rooms and the stacks where the collections were stored were reduced to smoking vistas of blackened rubble.
From The NY Times
Among other buildings afire or still smoldering in eastern Baghdad today were the city hall, the Agriculture Ministry and — so thoroughly burned that heat still radiated 50 paces from its front doors — the National Library. Not far from the National Museum of Iraq, which was looted on Thursday and Friday with the loss of almost all of its store of 170,000 artifacts, the library was considered another of the repositories of an Iraqi civilization dating back at least 7,000 years.
By tonight, virtually nothing was left of the library and its tens of thousands of old manuscripts and books, and of archives like Iraqi newspapers tracing the country's turbulent history from the era of Ottoman rule through to Mr. Hussein. Reading rooms and the stacks where the collections were stored were reduced to smoking vistas of blackened rubble.
From The NY Times
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Re:
on 16 Apr 2003 20:02 (UTC)