Eighteen U.S. insurers support ALR through an annual fee based on fine art premiums, and a recovery fee for anything retrieved that has been paid out on, he said.

But Mr. Shillingford explained that reports of thousands of artifacts being stolen from the Baghdad Museum are inaccurate.

"You probably remember in the very early days there were rumors of tens, if not hundreds of thousands of items being looted from the Baghdad museum," Mr. Shillingford said. "It has emerged that a number of items had been taken for safe keeping. It now seems that the total of items that may have been [stolen] from the museum is closer to 1,000 than the original numbers feared."

The number of artifacts reported stolen have been "reduced significantly because items have been located," he noted.

He added that reports that stolen museum items returned by citizens were also erroneous. "It appears that a lot of those were not items that came from the museum, and are either fakes or just lumps of rock that people hoped to get a reward for turning in," he said.

Experts in the museum community have been busy researching and confirming which items were, in fact, stolen, he said.

Currently 26 of those items are now registered on the ALR database, he said. The Interpol Web site lists 19 stolen items. Other organizations involved in recovering lost artifacts from Iraq are the Federal Bureau of Investigation and UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), he said.

"We've only just started putting the [stolen] items on our database," he said. "There are bound to be more. The worst thing to do would be to just put any items up that might be missing because that would just confuse everyone."

Mr. Shillingford said that several items have been recovered from the Desert Storm conflict in 1991. One item recovered in 2002 by ALR is an Assyrian gypsum relief from the palace of Assurnasirpal II, which was at Nimrud in Mesopotamia, he said.

The item, which at one time was in a museum, was excavated in the 1970s. The item has been seized and is now being investigated in London.

Mr. Shillingford said the gypsum relief was discovered while it was being imported into the United Kingdom. "We were able to identify it as this item that had been in Iraq and should not have left Iraq," he said. "If it's the piece we suspect it to be, it could be worth $1 million to $2 million."

The Gulf War, he said, "is a slightly different situation because no one had access to Iraq," so therefore, "no one had access to when [artifacts] left the country."

ALR, he noted, has recovered numerous antiquities from various parts of the world that have been illegally excavated. But an item without a history is more difficult to investigate, he explained. "If something hasn't been seen for 6,000 years, it will not be on our database."

Mr. Shillingford said he is confident that stolen items from the Iraq war will be recovered. "We've started registering items from this war and in the long term we'll have better access to information about what is missing than we did after the 1991 conflict," he said. "These things will sooner or later surface."

He added that the antiquities trade, which consists of museums, dealers and collectors, "does search extensively with us before they acquire items, so there is a good chance of recovering some of them. They would be unwise not to carry out a search with us, and most do."