Iraqi manuscripts would be priceless resources to Western researchers, according to al-Rahim, if they were made available and properly catalogued.

Al-Dewachi, who has not been back to his homeland since 1998, said he thought there was a “thirst in Iraq right now for exposure to the outside world.” “It’s a place that’s been decapitated from the international community,” he said.

Al-Rahim returned from a conference in Baghdad on civics and education last Sunday, where he toured some of the city’s functioning libraries.

“Books are a little bit sparse,” he said of the library in the University of Baghdad’s Women’s College. “There was a reference room with some basic works in literature in the humanities library, but there’s a great need for books of all kinds—particularly in English as there’s a tremendous demand right now to learn English and to read or be published in it.”

Other libraries, he said, did not survive war-time pillaging.

“One of the libraries in the center of Baghdad was completely looted and burned,” he said. “There were many manuscripts lost there. It’s very sad and devastating to look at this building, previously a library, which is now just a burned out black shell. For someone who loves books, it’s a very difficult thing to see.”

Al-Rahim said he visited several bookstores while in Iraq, including the outdoor vendors on al-Mutanabbi Street, where the sidewalks are lined with collections of used volumes.

“Many of them had the covers or the title pages ripped off,” he said. “Some of them you could see that they were part of a library because they had official stamps on them. They were being sold out for 250 dinars, which is about 20 cents a book.”

Al-Rahim said that the books had clearly been looted from a library and disfigured in such a way that their origins were untraceable.

Such widespread looting has been happening since the first Gulf War, said al-Rahim, who while visiting one bookstore came across an entire storeroom of volumes that he said were stolen from the University of Kuwait library in the 1990s.

“If the Iraqi police were organized or interested, they could seize them back, but books are one of the lowest priorities right now on the police agenda,” he said.

Although he attributed the rampant theft to a failure on the military’s part to secure academic institutions, al-Rahim said that Iraqi customs and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security have been doing “quite a bit” to retrieve the items.

“What you need is people who know these books and who can identify them and take them back for the library,” he said.

—Staff writer Leon Neyfakh at neyfakh@fas.harvard.edu.