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ON THE COVER: The Mask of Warka, a life-sized marble head dating to approximately 3100 B.C. and one of the most historically significant of thousands of objects discovered missing from the Iraq Museum, was recovered in a backyard in Baghdad by the U.S. Army’s 812th Military Police Company and returned to the museum in September 2003. The sculpture is thought to be one of the earliest naturalistic depictions of a human face. In “Tracking the Looted Treasures of Iraq”, Matthew Bogdanos, the Marine colonel who until recently headed the U.S. military’s counter-terrorism task force, tells of his team’s efforts to recover the artifacts looted from the Iraq Museum in the spring of 2003.