ABOVE: a gold crown, one of the Treasures of Nimrud, a trove of 8th or 9th century BCE jewelery, which was briefly misplaced in Iraq after the whole war thing started.

Whole lotta looting going on, it seems. (see: pretty much every post we’ve made in the past month.) In order to promote his new book, Thieves of Baghdad, Matthew Bogdanos, the US Army’s chief guy looking into the looting of thousands of priceless treasures from Iraqi museums after the fall of Baghdad, tells the world that a lot of stuff was stolen and we’ll probably never see it again.

According to witness reports, about 300-400 thieves made off with more than 13,000 items from the Iraq Museum’s collection (about 5,000 have been recovered). On top of the fact that it’s a cultural disaster, now various insurgent factions within Iraq are apparently using the artifacts circulating on the black market to fund their fighting. Bogdanos calls the thieves’ haul a “cash crop,” and estimates it’ll take decades to recover most of the rest of the antiquities. Oh, and the book was co-written with thriller writer William Patrick, so it’s probably totally hyped up like the Da Vinci Code or something.

LINK: al Mendhar > On the trail of stolen Iraqi art