The National Library of Iraq, now in flames, was a key repository of the history of Iraq; its newspaper archives chronicled the day-to-day history of Iraq from the days of the Ottoman Empire
It took the Taliban several weeks of placing dynamite bundles around the Bamiyan Buddhas, while their soldiers stubbed out cigarettes on the heads of the ancient statues, before they obliterated those symbols of the past for all time.
It took a mob rampaging through Baghdad a far shorter time