(the exact figure isn't known). Hundreds of children were orphaned, scores of women raped, hundreds wounded, homes and Jewish-owned shops were looted. Although some Arabs did defend their Jewish neighbors, stories abound of pregnant women eviscerated, babies mutilated, and Jewish hospital patients refused treatment or poisoned. The dead were hurriedly buried in a mass grave.
There's some controversy about the extent to which the Nazis were behind this, notably in the person of Fritz Grobba, the German ambassador to Baghdad from 1932.
Back to the Times article:
Baghdad and Washington are in talks to return the Iraqi Jewish Archives, over 2,700 books and tens of thousands of documents whisked away to the US after the invasion.
Such initiatives could save Jewish heritage across the country, including the Baghdad home of Sassoon Eskell, Iraq’s first finance minister under British mandate.
Eskell established Iraq’s first financial system and indexed its currency to gold.
“He was one of the columns in Iraq’s history. You don’t get two men like that,” said Rifaat Abderrazzaq, an expert on Baghdad’s Jewish heritage.
But today, Eskell’s home on the banks of the Tigris River in the capital lies abandoned and partly ruined.
More on the Iraqi-Jewish archives here.
And here's a brief (6 min) film I posted last year on the Jews of Baghdad.
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