THE red Toyota spluttered to a halt in front of the Iraq Museum and three men in their early twenties jumped out. As they struggled to lift a large object wrapped in a blanket out of the boot, the American guards on the gate raised their weapons.

For a moment, a priceless 5,000-year-old vase thought to have been lost in looting after the fall of Baghdad seemed about to meet its end. But one of the men peeled back the blanket to reveal carved alabaster pieces that were clearly something extraordinary.

Three feet high and weighing 600lb intact, this was the Sacred Vase of Warka, regarded by experts as one of the most precious of all the treasures taken during looting that shocked the world in the chaos following the fall of Baghdad. Broken in antiquity and stuck together, it was once again in pieces.

Having handed it over, the men jumped back into their car and drove off into the heat of the afternoon.

“Every day people are bringing things back,” said Dr Donny George, the museum’s director of research. Only an hour before the return of the Warka vase on Thursday, he had described its loss as one of the things he was most upset about, calling it “one of the real masterpieces of the world”.

The failure of American troops to stop the plundering of priceless antiquities while at the same time sending tanks to guard the oil ministry was seen as one of the scandals of the war. Some 170,000 items were reported stolen from the museum and Iraqi scholars were filmed in tears while western academics fell over each other to condemn it as “cultural genocide”.

However, the return of the Warka vase means the number of prized exhibits missing from the museum is now only 32. About 3,000 artefacts are believed to have been taken from the store rooms — a fraction of the earlier estimates.

“The museum is a classic example of how you can say anything bad about the Americans and people will believe it,” said a spokesman for the US-led Iraq administration.

Every Baghdadi has stories of how soldiers’ night-vision goggles are actually x-ray glasses to enable them to see through women’s clothes. Last week an Iraqi newspaper published an article about US troops raping Iraqi women. It was later forced to retract.

A campaign for looters to return the museum’s treasures and promising an amnesty has resulted in the return of 1,500 items in the past two months.

Last week alone, 10 of the top exhibits were returned. One group of men brought back nine items from the Assyrian galleries. Among them was a statue of King Shalmaneser III — who ruled in the 9th century BC — on a pedestal inscribed with deeds and conquests from the ancient city of Nimrud. The items also included a large inscribed tablet from the sumptuous palace of King Ashurnasirpal II.

A locked room in the museum, guarded by a sullen-faced woman in a black veil, acts as a repository for the returned items. Ivory pieces and figures that decorated thrones at Nimrud from the 8th century BC lie scattered on a table, along with beads, ancient silver bangles, swords and pieces of broken pots.

“Everyone said the Iraqis are thieves, but they are bringing all this back and asking for nothing,” said Dr Ahmad Kamil, deputy director of the museum.

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