U.S. Helps Recover Statue and Gives It Back to Iraqis

One of the most important treasures looted in the ransacking of Iraq’s national museum three years ago has been recovered in a clandestine operation involving the United States government and was turned over to Iraqi officials in Washington yesterday.

The piece, a headless stone statue of the Sumerian king Entemena of Lagash, was stolen in the days after the fall of Baghdad. In the wake of the looting, American officials came under sharp criticism from archaeologists and others for failing to secure the museum, a vast storehouse of artifacts from civilization’s first cities.

The Entemena statue was taken across the border to Syria, and put on sale on the international antiquities market. Thousands of looted artifacts that remained in Iraq — from tiny cylinder seals to the famed Warka Vase — have since been returned to the museum, and a few pieces have been turned over by foreign countries, including Italy and the Netherlands. But the Entemena statue, estimated to be 4,400 years old, is the first significant artifact returned from the United States and by far the most important piece found outside Iraq.