Troops 'are letting looters smuggle Iraqi antiquities'

The American military was accused yesterday of doing nothing to prevent the mass smuggling of Iraq's antiquities – three weeks after the country's museums were ransacked.

Dr Donny George, the Iraq Museum's head of research, saidat the British Museum: "Anyone can take anything and go out of the country. It's a tragedy.'' Border checks were only being made on its western frontier by Jordanian police, he said.

Dr George and his colleague at the British Museum, Dr John Curtis, said thousands of objects were now thought to have been looted from the Iraq Museum – one of the most important museum collections in the world.

Among them is the Warka Vase from Uruk – a large limestone vessel decorated with a relief of ancient religious rites that dates from 3,100BC.

Also lost is the spectacular gold covering of an ancient lyre from the Sumerian city of Ur; a headless, inscribed statue of King Entemena of Lagash, dating from 2,400BC, and an ivory carving of a lion attacking a Nubian, made in around 800BC, from Nimrud.

A Roman statue from the time of the Emperor Trajan, and a marble statue of the Greek god Poseidon, from AD160, are also on the missing list.

Later today, Koichiro Matsuura, the director general of Unesco, is due to meet Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, in New York to ensure that the UN Security Council passes a resolution banning the export of antiquities from Iraq. This would massively bolster existing conventions protecting cultural heritage, which have not yet been ratified by America and some other countries.

A full inventory of the damage will not be completed for months. After appeals by clerics, some objects are now being returned and there is a local amnesty to encourage looters to return items.