"(About the 2003 invasion of Iraq) Saddam Hussein was a Sunni, and the Sunni Islamic minority – a significant minority – effectively held power. The Shiites did not; on the contrary, they had been oppressed, especially in the centre and south. So when Saddam's regime fell, the first thing that happened was that the Shiites took power. As a result, between the allies who were advancing and bringing down the regime and the others who did not know how they would react, anarchy reigned. Every day there were attacks, not military ones, but by those seeking to seize power or take advantage of the situation to steal. It was a period of huge fires and casualties: just because someone was driving by, they would steal their car... There was chaos, no one knew who was in charge, the military and the police had disappeared, there was no authority of any kind to control the situation. Everyone remembers the looting of the ministries, except for one that was immediately guarded: the oil ministry. I remember well how one of the most terrible things was the looting of the museums, where thousands of works of art disappeared. Even the American military took them away, and in fact they were later found in their backpacks. The burning of the immense Library of Baghdad was also terrible. For two or three days, ash rained down on the city. It was an unacceptable destruction: to attack the libraries was to attack history, the life of a people, not to mention the fact that all of humanity was deprived of priceless treasures."