Cradle of civilization being robbed of history Under the cover of war, thieves are looting Mesopotamia.

BAGHDAD - He works as a blacksmith in one of Baghdad's swarming Shiite slums. But at least once a month, Abu Saif tucks a pistol into his belt, hops into a minibus taxi, and speeds south.

His goal: to unearth ancient treasures from thousands of archaeological sites scattered across southern Iraq.

Images of Baghdad's ransacked National Museum, custodian of a collection dating back to the beginning of civilization, provoked an international outcry in the early days of the war in 2003.

The ancient statues, intricately carved stone panels, delicate earthenware and glittering gold are now protected by locked gates and heavily armed guards.

But U.S. and Iraqi experts say a tragedy on an even greater scale continues to unfold at more than 12,000 largely unguarded sites where illegal diggers such as Abu Saif are chipping away at Iraq's heritage.

"It may well be that more stuff has come out of the sites than was ever in the Iraqi museum," said Elizabeth Stone, an archaeology professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Iraqi officials say the U.S. government has supported their efforts to retrieve looted antiquities from the Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Islamic and other civilizations, but they don't hide their bitterness that more was not done to secure them in the first place.

"The American forces, when they entered, they protected all the oil wells and the Ministry of Oil . . . but the American forces paid no attention to Iraq's heritage," said Abdul Zahra Talaqani, media director for Iraq's Ministry of Tourism and Archaeology.

The thefts were already taking place before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, but U.S. and Iraqi experts say they surged in the chaos that followed.

Abu Saif, a man in his mid-30s, was 14 when relatives introduced him to the hunt for buried treasure. Asked why he does it, he grins. "For the thrill of it," he said.

In the beginning, he served as lookout while men worked. Now, he has his own tight-knit group of four or five diggers. He collects tips from farmers about possible archaeological sites and researches them before excavating. They work quickly, finishing a job in two to three days.

Talaqani says criminal gangs buy the artifacts and smuggle them out of the country.

Abu Saif avoids the more famous sites such as the ancient cities of Isin, Shurnpak and Umma because "there are eyes upon them." But he says there are plenty of out-of-the way places near Kut and Nasiriyah that will yield small treasures. The artifacts include coins, jewelry, and the fragile clay tablets etched in wedge-like cuneiform script that record myths, decrees, business transactions and other details of ancient Mesopotamian life.

Stone has been tracing the thefts at 2,000 sites in the south using DigitalGlobe satellite imagery. She estimates that looters have torn up about 167 million square feet.

Taking advantage of an ebb in violence, the Iraqi government this year resumed its own excavations for the first time since the war started. It now has 11 teams on a salvage mission in southern Iraq. But almost everywhere they have been, illegal diggers have been before them, leaving devastation in their wake.

The loss is incalculable. It was here, in the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, that human beings began to etch words into clay, to codify laws and to build cities. Now, the records of that evolution are slipping away.

Stolen artifacts occasionally turn up on the market or in private collections, but experts suspect that most of the stolen objects are hidden in warehouses around the world because they are too hot to sell.

Once the artifacts leave Iraq, officials are virtually powerless to retrieve them because they appear on no inventory.

The Iraqi government has formed a specialized guard force to secure archaeological sites. But at just 1,400 men, it is no match for the armed gangs responsible for much of the looting.

UNESCO provided training and donated 37 vehicles to the project. And in November the agency held a conference to urge countries to set up "safe havens" where recovered items could be stored until they could be returned to Iraq.

But Mohammed Djelib, who heads UNESCO's Iraq office, said it would take a more serious effort by Iraq's own government, its neighbors, and the world at large to safeguard what he described as the heritage of humanity.