There was some discussion a few weeks back (here and here for example) about some mysterious "10000 artefacts" that the Iraqis annouced they would be getting back from the US after they had all been "registered in an electronic archive at Cornell University in the state of New York before they are returned". There was a lack of clarity about what was involved, though it was suspected that they were the documents concerning Iraqi Jews being conserved at the National Archives (approximately 2,700 books and “tens of thousands” of sodden documents retrieved from a ruined Baghdad basement when U.S. troops invaded Iraq a decade ago). This now turns out to be the case, and they will be returning to Iraq next year: Michael E. Ruane, "Archives readies a schoolgirl’s records and a trove of Jewish treasures for return to Iraq", The Washington Post August 13th 2013.
The trove, named the Iraqi Jewish Archive, was found by U.S. troops on May 6, 2003, in the bombed-out headquarters of the Mukhabarat, Hussein’s secret police — who had, among other things, busily gathered intelligence on Iraqi Jews. Most Jews had fled Iraq years before in the face of the violence and intimidation of the mid- to late 1900s, leaving behind the last traces of their rich 2,500-year history there, Archives officials said. With the consent of Iraqi authorities, the material was brought to the National Archives for conservation later in 2003 [...]. But the project stagnated, according to a State Department official, as Iraq descended into insurgency and sectarian bloodshed, and it was not clear who in the Iraqi government would be the contact for the project.But it is good to see that these problems have been resolved and the Iraqi Jewish Archives (IJA) items are being fully documented and the originals returned to Baghdad, to the Iraqi National Library and Archives (Director Saad Eskander).
