Wading through the slivers of glass and twisted bars of metal, Haider and his two sons hunt for any banknote not incinerated when the bank was arsoned.

"Each day I manage to scrape up around 5,000 dinars," just under two dollars, says Haider.

Notes worth 250, 100 and 25 dinars are littered across the ground. Inside the dark offices and basements, the money chase is made easier with candles, flashlights or even old files lit into makeshift torches.

No entrepreneur, however, knows where to find the printing machines, a discovery that could make him or her quite well-off.

Since US troops rolled into central Baghdad on April 9, Iraq's central bank has been ransacked and then ransacked again by mobs of looters, with furious rioters celebrating the end of Saddam's draconian rule by tearing up millions of dinars worth of money bearing his face.

The entire building was torched. The glass rooftop crashed down and the seven storeys crumbled into ash. But safety considerations hardly kept Iraqis away, with dozens arriving each day to rummage through what little of the bank is penetrable in search of the bills that can get them food, water or cigarettes.

But even if dinar notes are found whole they are often unusable, as bank employees who foresaw the looting punched two holes in each. Dinars that lack serial numbers are also invalid, explain the looters, who have suddenly become currency experts.

Despite the absence of all authority here, Mohammad Yabbar, the former errand boy, still reports to work, and is in despair.

"I still come to the job every day even though there are no offices or bosses," he says. "In any case, if one day some bank official comes, I'll be here."

The central bank is not the only financial institution that has been in the looters' sights. The Rashid, Rafidain, Babylonia and other smaller banks, both state-run and those with private participation, have been pillaged.

"We had 3.5 billion dinars (roughly one million dollars) in the safes. All of it disappeared," says Nadia Abdul Jattar, director of Rafidain Bank's subsidiary in the Bab Moazzam neighborhood.

The branch's 24 employees stopped working the day before US tanks came into central Baghdad. If it provides any consolation, at least the files are safe.

"All our data is on disks and we kept some files in our house. I could go back to work tomorrow, but from a financial standpoint the bank no longer exists and, besides, how are we going to explain all these losses to our customers?" she asks.

Like others, she believes not only that US troops didn't intervene to stop the looting, but that they helped the thieves do their work. As evidence, she points out that the bank's safes were supposed to be inpenetrable.

"You've got to have a lot of precision to open our safes. It couldn't have been done by ordinary civilians," she charges.

SPACE.WIRE