Apart from a trail of death and human misery, the war against Iraq could deal a heavy blow to the cultural heritage of a country known as the cradle of civilisation.
The world's first urban communities flourished in Mesopotamia in the region between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers some 6,000 years ago.
But since the Gulf War in 1991, Iraq's 33 museums which house a wealth of ancient treasures have fallen into disrepair and been the victims of ruthless plundering.
More than 4,000 pieces of rare Sumerian, Babylonian, Akkadian, Assyrian, Persian, Greek and Arab art have disappeared from museums across the country, said Monir Bouchenaki, deputy head for culture at the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).
Those museums in southern Basra, northern Mosul and central Karbala, were the most badly ransacked.
In 1991 antiquity traffickers and poverty-stricken Iraqis sacked the museum of the southern port town of Basra, which was Wednesday under siege by US-British forces.
The Baghdad museum was spared that fate, Bouchenaki said, but fell into decay in the wake of UN sanctions which remained in force against Iraq after the first Gulf War.
"I visited the museum in 1998. It suffered from a lack of maintenance: termites were eating through walls, the electricity was cut. The air conditioning didn't work and the fluctuating temperatures wreaked havoc on the artifacts," he said.
The museum was renovated and reopened in 2001 as was the celebrated Al-Moustansiriya monument. But the current war threatens to throw these efforts back to square one.
Bombs, vandalism and trafficking also threaten Iraq's 25,000-odd defenseless archaeological sites. More than 10,000 edifices, mostly made of bricks and stones, adorn Mesopotamia - or the land between two rivers - dating back to pre-Islam pyramid-like Ziggourats, to Muslim mausoleums, mosques and palaces.
And the damage has already been inflicted.
According to Iraqi press reports, the head of an ox sculpture at the celebrated Temple of Sargon II (721-505 BC) was sawn off.
Bombs dropped in 1991 damaged or destroyed mosques and ancient churches throughout the country. The Arch of Ktesiphon, south of Baghdad, is reported to be on the verge of collapse, while the Ziggourat in Ur, said in the Bible to be the hometown of Abraham, is riddled with bullet holes.
During the age of the Sumerians (3500 to 2350 BC) the most amazing buildings were erected. Mathematics flourished and revolutionary irrigation techniques were developed.
The Babylonians who followed (1730 to 1595 BC) bequeathed to the world the groundbreaking body of laws devised by Hammourabi. The Neobabylonians (792 to 595 BC) invented algebra and the division of time into minutes and seconds.
According to Bouchenaki, the museums and sites under the gravest threat are those in the likely war zones of Ashur, Nineveh, Samarra, Tikrit the hometown of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein as well as Babylon, Ktesiphon, Karbala and Basra to the south.
Only the northwestern Hellenistic shrine at Hatra has been declared by UNESCO a site of world cultural heritage.
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