Coalition Forces Work to Restore Services to Baghdad; Iraqi Museum Curators Get Help from British Colleagues
CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: Let's go back to Baghdad now. Providing the basic necessities of life is still one of the big challenges. CNN's Michael Holmes joins us live from the Iraqi capital. Hello -- Michael.</s>MICHAEL HOLMES, CNN CORRESPONDENT: That's right, Carol. Hi to you. Yes, necessities of life, we take things like water and electricity for granted. Neither here at the moment in Baghdad. They say they're working on it. They keep saying anytime now. We still wait. Meanwhile, some funny little glimpses of normal life. While there is still shooting going on around us, routinely this morning we've been hearing a lot of gunfire, and yet you'll see a bus driving down the road with passengers, people jumping on and off, paying their fares and the like. They have double-decker buses here, like they do in London. It's curious now that we have traffic jams, taxicabs going around, and now for the first time today we've seen buses loaded with passengers going to and from. Another less happy sign of normality here is people reacting to rumors about lost loved ones. All around the city, people have been going to prisons and places they think are prisons to look for loved ones. What you're looking I think now is something our cameraman came across -- one of our cameramen came across today. A rumor spread that this place was the site of an underground prison, one of these supposedly hidden jails where some of the many, many missing, vanished, arrested people had been held. The people started trying to get in there. They started digging and trying to force their way in. Eventually, it turned out, Carol, that there was nothing there, and they have yet to find any of these hidden places as yet. Another major concern here has been the looting that's gone on, and in particular, focus at the moment is on what happened at the Antiquities Museum. You may remember, it was looted of unbelievably valuable things. This is the place, the area of Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization. And some of the goods that were looted in there and carried out by the armful are irreplaceable and invaluable. Liz George has a report.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Iraq's history, Iraq's culture, it's all demolished.</s>LIZ GEORGE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): A cry from the heart from one of Iraq's archeologists, a cry echoing around the world.</s>NEIL MCGREGOR, DIR., BRITISH MUSEUM: It's a catastrophe. It's a catastrophe for the people of Iraq. It's a catastrophe for the whole world, because the civilization of ancient Iraq was the first urban civilization in the world.</s>GEORGE: As the extent of the looting and destruction came to light, experts in the U.K. were already making plans to help. The British Museum is home to the largest Mesopotamian collection outside Iraq, including some of the earliest forms of writing.</s>MCGREGOR: It's the duty of the international community to try to restore as much as possible to the museum, and then I think the international community must organize itself to help their Iraqi colleagues restore what is left. The British Museum is putting six conservators and three curators into this. As soon as it's possible, they will go to work with their Iraqi colleagues in Baghdad to give whatever their Iraqi colleagues feel they need.</s>GEORGE: The first job will be to log what's gone. (on camera): The links between the British Museum and the Iraqi people responsible for preserving the antiquities and some of the archeological sites means at least there is a record of some of the key objects, and identifying these objects is the first step towards recovering these treasures.</s>DICK ELLIS, ANTIQUITIES EXPERT: Between London and New York you've probably got 80 to 90 percent of the world's antiquity sales.</s>GEORGE (voice-over): Dick Ellis is an expert in recovering stolen art. He says with London being the most important market for Islamic art, it's here that the looted treasures could reappear.</s>ELLIS: The first thing to do is to asses what has been stolen and to create a circular of certainly the key objects and to get that circular out into the marketplace to close down the route-to-market and to be able to identify these pieces as they surface.</s>GEORGE: With good records, an illegitimate sale is unlikely.</s>MCGREGOR: It will be impossible for our members to buy Sumerian, or indeed any other Mesopotamian antiquities for the foreseeable future without absolutely cast-iron problems because of the danger of buying material that's been stolen from these museums.</s>GEORGE: But for the curators in Iraq, identifying and circulating details of what's been taken comes second to the ongoing struggle of protecting items from further looting. Liz George, CNN, London.</s>HOLMES: And ongoing criticism, too, Carol, of U.S. forces that came in here and did not protect that place, not to mention hospitals and the like. Archeologists in the U.S. and elsewhere say they advised U.S. that looting of the museum was a real risk well before the war even began, and yet nothing was done. Colin Powell eventually saying that troops would be put at the museum, but not by then. It was days too late -- Carol.</s>COSTELLO: Understand. Michael Holmes reporting live from Baghdad this morning. TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com. Iraqi Museum Curators Get Help from British Colleagues>