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« Last post by Virgil H on Yesterday at 09:19:45 pm »
I served in Iraq twice and Afghanistan once. Any looting is greatly exaggerated by US soldiers. In Iraq, a small detachment from my unit was at Babylon and every time the insurgents mortared the position and hit the ruins, we got blamed. To the point that they moved the base. I had a rock confiscated from me when I left by Customs that was in my pocket. Looting happened I am sure, but by Iraqis mainly.
This totally sounds like a scam and there are many scams using US forces as pretext, mostly romantic scams looking for money. I bought a coin in Ghazni in Afghanistan from a street vendor I posted here years ago, "an obvious tourist fake" and it was so bad Joe didn't even ask for a fake report. Very, very few Americans had any access to loot anything. And the US was totally stupid when it came to allowing us to take "war trophies" to the point it was nuts. No flags, no nothing. All I got out was a small tile from one of Saddam's palaces that was lying on the ground when I found it (like 30 mm wide) and a small piece of shrapnel I dug out of my living quarters after a mortar attack (and there was no reason not to be allowed to have that, but I had to hide it). If Customs had found that, they would have taken them. I guarantee no wide scale looting of coins or anything else happened by us. I bet you are getting targeted because of Wildwinds and most, if not all, are actually not Americans and the coins are probably fakes or non-existent and pictures taken off the Internet.
Virgil