Looting here has become a family pastime. Fathers, mothers and their children can be seen everywhere, transporting stolen goods with ear-to-ear smiles.

The Iraqi Foreign Ministry, which has been secured by US troops, is the only government building not to have been damaged either by US/UK forces or the looters.

The once-affluent Al-Qadisiyah district, where most of the ministers of the collapsed Baath Party lived, is the most heavily looted area. Families still living there have taken to protecting their houses by taking shifts armed with AK-47s and RPGs.

At the house of the last foreign minister, Naji Sabri Al-Hadithi, all that is left is his huge collection of books. The last one he bought was a biography of James Baker.

One of the looters held a photograph of the minister and his family vacationing in Paris. “He was able to travel anywhere he liked,” he told Arab News. “But what about me? Why haven’t I been allowed to travel?”

On the other side of Baghdad, Uday Hussein’s exotic car garage has become a popular sightseeing destination for local Iraqis.

Although two of the garages were reportedly set ablaze by Uday himself, the day US troops entered Baghdad the rest were vandalized by locals — including the bullet-ridden Porsche Carrera Uday was said to have been driving during a 1998 assassination attempt.

Rumors are circulating that in an area near one of Uday’s farms, a mass grave has been discovered which is filled with the skeletons of hundreds of teenage girls unlucky enough to have caught Uday’s eye.

Outside the Palestine Hotel, Iraqi volunteers, some with medical backgrounds, asked US troops if they could collect dead bodies reportedly still littering the surrounding streets.

Once put in a truck, the bodies were taken to a nearby children’s hospital, where they were buried in the front yard. Many were unidentified, but the relatives of others stood somberly nearby.

Anwar, a 14 year-old Iraqi child, asked this reporter: “When will it be safe? When will we have a government? Are we going to have a Muslim government?”

“That’s what we want,” he added, “because we are Muslims.”

But an angry middle-aged Iraqi interjected, saying directly to a US soldier: “No, we don’t want Arab rulers anymore, we want the Americans to govern us.”

In a repeat of similar public demonstrations, in Saddam Square yesterday a crowd of Iraqis was shouting: “Where is the peace? We need food! We need water! We need aid!” One banner strung between two electric poles said “US President George W. Bush supports the looters”.

Gangs ransacked the National Museum, smashing display cases to grab treasures dating back thousands of years to the dawn of civilization in Mesopotamia.

The museum’s Deputy Director Nabhal Aminhey said they had looted or destroyed 170,000 items of antiquity which were worth billions of dollars.