Baghdad museum's greatest treasures 'stolen to order'

Three of the most important antiquities in the history of civilisation were apparently "stolen to order" from the National Museum in Baghdad in the looting that greeted the toppling of Saddam Hussein.

The three objects are a 5,000-year-old vase, an Akkadian (Babylonian-Assyrian) statue base from 2000BC and an Assyrian stone statue from about 800BC. An international alert will now be mounted for these items.

Distraught Iraqi curators said they alone were guarding the shattered fragments of their collections and had resolved to stay because American forces were still unwilling to stand guard outside the National Museum in Baghdad despite international condemnation of the looting.

While there was little left to steal, they stressed the importance of making sure the broken pots, statues and other precious relics of the ancient Iraqi civilisations of Assyria and Mesopotamia – the "cradle of urban civilisation" – lay undisturbed until experts arrived to try to piece them back together.

The British Museum, under its director, Neil MacGregor, announced yesterday that it was to take the lead in forging an international "cultural coalition" to find the money and the expertise to help to restore what remains of Iraq's devastated heritage.

"It is clear that a catastrophe has befallen the cultural heritage of Iraq. We hope that the British Government and the international community can move quickly to take the steps necessary to avoid further damage," Dr MacGregor told a press conference originally convened to launch his museum's 250th anniversary celebrations. Dr MacGregor also called on the Americans to make Iraq's museums secure and urged the international community to ensure that any Iraqi antiquities that made their way on to the market were returned.

The United Nations' cultural organisation, Unesco, is to send a team to Iraq to assess the damage and an anonymous private benefactor in Britain has also put up funds for six conservators and three curators to start work as soon as is safe.

Tessa Jowell, the Culture and Media Secretary, said: "Just as the international effort will help to rebuild schools and hospitals and the essential infrastructure, my argument is that the museums and cultural heritage are also essential infrastructure to the rebirth of a democratic Iraq."

She added, "I very much hope that the American troops will afford protection to the museum in Baghdad in the way that British troops are affording protection to the museum in Basra. It's a duty that they owe the Iraqi people that they came to set free." Ms Jowell also insisted it would have been impossible to have anticipated the scale of the looting, in response to concern that any action now would be too little, too late.

Academics and archaeologists had repeatedly raised fears about the potential threat before invasion. But John Curtis, the British Museum's keeper of the Ancient Near East collections, admitted that no one had made specific warnings to safeguard the museums, not least because there was an expectation that they would be protected.

He spoke to the National Museum curators in Baghdad for the first time yesterday via a link-up to Iraq courtesy of Channel 4. Dr Curtis came off the telephone line shocked at the losses. "They're heartbroken," he said of his colleagues in the Iraqi capital.