Former Iraqi Baath party's archive in Baghdad again
Shafaq News / The United States returned the archive of the former Iraqi Baath Party to Baghdad, via an American military cargo plane, according to what was revealed by the Wall Street Journal".
The newspaper stated that the move was a, "goodwill initiative towards the new prime minister, Mustafa Al-Kadhimi", according to US officials.
The United States reserved the Iraqi archive to protect it, with the escalation of violence in the Iraqi capital 15 years ago, two years after the fall of former President Saddam Hussein, leader of the Baath Party.
This archive, which contains about 6 million documents, was shipped after being well packed for fear of being intercepted by armed groups backed by Iran. It is safe but in an unknown place in the Iraqi capital.
In 2013, the United States returned several packages of documents it had preserved after the 2003 war that toppled the Baath Party, raising concerns among Western researchers that these documents might be politically exploited by former Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.
After the chaos that engulfed Baghdad in April 2003, Academician Kanan Makiya and the current Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi returned to Iraq from Britain, "and discovered a trove of official records in a waterlogged basement that provided an inside look at the Baath Party". They both transferred these documents to Makiya's family house with an American blessing, to the newspaper.
As violence rates increased in the capital, the documents were transferred to the United States, where they were initially kept in West Virginia, before being sent to the Hoover Institution, a conservative institution at Stanford University in California.
The institution maintains a digital archive of all these documents.
In a 2008 statement, the American Directory of Archival Organizations and the Association of Canadian Archivists urged that these documents be returned to the Iraqi government, at a time when Kanan Makiya was saying that the Iraqi government had formally agreed to rearrange the archives by the Hoover Institution.
