Year zero
War, chaos, and the destruction of culture in Iraq.

By Robert Fisk

SO YESTERDAY (April 14) came the burning of books. First came the looters, then came the arsonists. It was the final chapter in the sack of Baghdad.

The National Library and Archives – a priceless treasure of Ottoman historical documents including the royal archives of Iraq – were turned to ashes in 3,000 degrees of heat. Then the library of Korans at the Ministry of Religious Endowment was set ablaze.

I saw the looters. One of them cursed me when I tried to reclaim a book of Islamic law from a boy who could have been no more than 10 years old. Amid the ashes of hundreds of years of Iraqi history, I found just one file blowing in the wind outside: pages and pages of handwritten letters between the court of Sherif Hussein of Mecca – who started the Arab revolt against the Turks for Lawrence of Arabia – and the Ottoman rulers of Baghdad.

And the Americans did nothing. All over the filthy yard they blew, letters of recommendation to the courts of Arabia, demands for ammunition for Ottoman troops, reports on the theft of camels and attacks on pilgrims, all of them in delicate handwritten Arabic script.

I was holding in my hands the last Baghdad vestiges of Iraq's written history. But for Iraq, this is year zero; with the destruction of the antiquities in the Museum of Archaeology on Saturday and the burning of the National Archives and then the Koranic library 500 meters away, the cultural identity of Iraq is being erased.

Why? Who set these fires? For what insane purpose is this heritage being destroyed?

When I caught sight of the Koranic library burning – there were flames 100 feet high bursting from the windows – I raced to the offices of the occupying power, the U.S. Marines' Civil Affairs Bureau, to report what I had seen. An officer shouted to a colleague that "this guy says some biblical [sic] library is on fire." I gave the map location, the precise name – in Arabic and English – of the fire; I said the smoke could be seen from three miles away and it would take only five minutes to drive there.

Half an hour later, there wasn't an American at the scene – and the flames were now shooting 200 feet into the air.

There was a time when the Arabs said their books were written in Cairo, printed in Beirut, and read in Baghdad. Now they burn libraries in Baghdad. In the National Archives were not just the Ottoman records of the caliphate, but even the dark years of the country's modern history, handwritten accounts of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, with personal photographs and military diaries, an entire library of Western newspapers.

But the older files and archives were on the upper floors of the library opposite the Ministry of Defense, where petrol must have been used to set fire so expertly to the building. The heat was of such strength that the marble flooring had buckled upward and the concrete stairs, which I climbed through the acres of smoldering documents, had been cracked by the furnace.

The papers on the floor were almost too hot to touch, bore no print or writing, and crumbled into ash the moment I picked them up. Let me quote from the shreds of paper that I found on the road outside, blowing in the wind, written by long-dead men to the Sublime Port in Istanbul or to the court of the Sherif of Mecca with expressions of loyalty and signed, "your slave."

There was a request to protect a camel convoy of tea, rice, and sugar, signed by Husni Attiya al-Hijazi, and a warning from Jaber al-Ayashi of the royal court of Sherif Hussein to Baghdad to warn of robbers in the desert. "This is just to give you our advice for which you will be highly rewarded," al-Ayashi writes. "If you don't take our advice, then we have warned you." A touch of Saddam there, I thought. The date was 1912.

King Feisal of the Hejaz, the ruler of Mecca – whose court personnel are the authors of many of the letters I saved – was later deposed by the Saudis. His son Feisel became king of Iraq – Winston Churchill gave him Baghdad after the French threw him out of Damascus – and his brother, Abdullah, became the first king of Jordan, the father of King Hussein, and the grandfather of the present-day Jordanian monarch, King Abdullah the Second.

This, in other words, was the tapestry of Arab history – all that is left of it, which fell into my hands – as the mass of documents of centuries still crackled in the immense heat of the ruins of these libraries.

For almost a thousand years, Baghdad was the cultural capital of the Arab world, the most literate population in the Middle East. Yesterday the black ashes of thousands of ancient documents filled the skies of Iraq.

Why? Who sent the looters? Who sent the arsonists? Were they paid? Who wants to destroy the identity of this country?

Robert Fisk writes from Baghdad for the Independent of London. This story is published by arrangement with the Independent syndicate.