Baghdad, May 13: The United States has agreed to return to Iraq millions of documents, including the Jewish archive, which were seized by the US military after the 2003 invasion, a minister said on Thursday.
“We have reached an agreement with the United States, after negotiations with officials at the State Department and the Pentagon, over the return of the Jewish archives and millions of documents that were taken to America after the events of 2003,” Deputy Culture Minister Taher Hamud said.
“The Jewish archives are important to us — like the rest of the documents, it is a part of our culture and sheds light on the lives of the Jewish community,” he told a news conference.
Iraq was home to a large Jewish community in ancient times but its members left en masse after the creation of Israel in 1948.
The documents, which fill 48,000 containers, are currently being held by the US State Department, the National Archives and the Hoover Institute, a think-tank.
“Despite logistical, technical and political obstacles, we took the first step along the path to the return of the archives,” Hamud said.
Iraqi National Archives director Saad Iskander said in October that some 60 percent of the archives, amounting to tens of millions of documents, were missing or had been damaged and destroyed in the aftermath of the US invasion.
—Agencies