Word: alie
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...more than 700 stolen artifacts, worth millions of dollars. Among them are gold necklaces, daggers, statues and pottery dating from the Islamic period to the Bronze Age. Negotiations with the Syrian government over the pieces took about three years, according to the museum's deputy director, Mahsen Hassan Ali. But it represents the biggest homecoming of looted Iraqi antiquities to date, and was hailed as a significant victory by the Iraqi government...
Muna Hassan, the head of a committee working on the restoration of pieces returned by Syria, says that further negotiations are now in the works with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Italy and Germany. So far, Ali says roughly 4,000 stolen pieces have been returned to the museum - most of them confiscated within Iraq's borders. Two days ago, an Iraqi citizen in the southern city of Nasiriyah offered the museum 643 artifacts, some of which he claimed to have excavated himself, said one museum official, who was not authorized to speak to the press. Many other items...
...museum's deputy director Ali says the institution lost an estimated 15,000 of some 200,000 artifacts during the days of looting and chaos that followed the U.S. invasion of Baghdad. In March UNESCO said that between 3,000 and 7,000 of those pieces are still missing. Nevertheless, some museum officials say the number of missing items is impossible to pinpoint because of lost records. "We have some of the records, but others were taken... Outside of Iraq, people want proof that the pieces were taken from the museum. That is the problem now because we lost some...
...Ali, who insists that the unique characteristics of Iraqi antiquities are known worldwide, says the process of reclaiming the items can take a long time due to each country's regulations. "Each country has its own specific rule, and whatever they find in their country, they have a special law to deal with extracting it," he said. As for how long that may take: "It depends on the politics of each country, and how much they're willing to cooperate. Of course there are some uncooperative countries...
...also up against secular Turkey's greatest irony - the Religious Affairs Directorate, a massive state-run bureaucracy whose billion-dollar budget employs 88,500 people and funds mosques, churches and synagogues, but refuses to recognize Alevi cemevi meeting halls as places of worship. To do so, argues Directorate head Ali Bardakoglu, would be heresy. Last year, AKP lawmaker Mustafa Ozbayrak, referring to Alevi demands that they be allocated state funds, said, "If you give this to the Alevis, will you give the Satanists the same tomorrow...