The preservation of more than 6 million records documenting Saddam Hussein’s regime was the subject of a symposium on March 8, 2005. The event was sponsored jointly by the Near East Section of the Library’s African and Middle Eastern Division and the Iraq Memory Foundation. Participants included Alaa al-Tamimi, the mayor of Baghdad, and Kanan Makiya, director of the Iraq Memory Foundation.

Makiya, an Iraqi exile, established the Iraq Research and Documentation Project at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University to study Iraqi documents seized in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War. This work was transferred to the newly created Iraq Memory Foundation in 2003. The mission of the foundation is to document the rule of Iraq between 1968 and 2003. The foundation is in charge of a collection of documents, including 3 million pages of reports and correspondence from the Baath Party headquarters. Selected scanned documents are included in this video.

As part of a State Department effort, a Library of Congress team visited Baghdad in October 2003 to assess war damage to the National Library of Iraq and the House of Manuscripts. The team found that some of the archival records documenting Saddam Hussein’s regime since 1977 were methodically incinerated while bound volumes in the library remained intact. The group documented its findings in a report that is accessible on the Library’s Web site at