Twenty years ago, on May 12, 2003, I crossed a US Navy-built bridge into southern Baghdad and a world most people knew only from TV coverage. The capital city had fallen about a month earlier to US forces, and I was part of a three-person Human Rights Watch team sent to document civilian casualties from the hostilities.
Falah Hassan is a trained deminer who has removed some of the thousands of improvised explosive devices, or IEDs buried in Iraq after the war with ISIS.
The retired geologist said he did not know it was illegal to take the pottery shards when he picked them up from the site. The harshness of his sentence came as a surprise.