Experts who have worked in Iraq in the past would be made available as soon as possible to any plundered museum or archeological site in the country, the institute said in a statement.

Baghdad's National Museum, which housed one of the world's great collections of artifacts from early Mesopotamian civilizations, was ransacked by looters on Friday in the upheaval following the entry of US troops into the city.

They took some 170,000 items of antiquity, dating back thousands of years.

Another museum in Mosul, in northern Iraq, has also been stripped and its Islamic library, housing one of the oldest surviving copies of the Koran, was ravaged by fire.

Iraq, known in ancient times as Mesopotamia, is considered the "cradle of civilisation", with thousands of archeological sites some of them up to 10,000 years old.

The UN's cultural organisation UNESCO has said that it intends to send a team of specialists to the war-ravaged country.

The Berlin-based German Archeological Institute has had a branch in Baghdad since 1955.

It has only been used occassionally by local staff since international sanctions were imposed on Iraq for invading Kuwait in 1990.

SPACE.WIRE