This morning, the ashes were still smoldering at the Ministry for Religious Affairs, where a building housing thousands of Korans, many of them illuminated and hand written, several a thousand years old, had been burned to a charred shell. It was another severe blow to Iraq's 10,000 years of cultural history, along with the looting of the National Museum and the burning of the National Library, in which countless priceless artifacts and books were lost.Now, THAT hurts.
"When Baghdad fell to the Mongols in 1258, these books survived," said Abdel Karim Anwar Obeid, 42, the ministry's general manager for administration. "And now they didn't survive. You can't put a price on this loss."
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