LONDON — About a year after American forces seized Baghdad, an Iraqi man approached the artist Dia al-Azzawi in a cafe in Amman, Jordan, and offered to sell him several rare paintings.

Mr. Azzawi, who helped to assemble collections for various Iraqi museums in the 1960s and 1970s, knew that two of the works had been plundered from Baghdad’s Museum of Modern Art. He failed to convince the man to return them.

Years later, Mr. Azzawi still finds it unfathomable that Iraqis pillaged various national museums in 2003 while the American troops who had toppled Saddam Hussein watched.

“All the people who went to steal everything, to destroy everything, they did it without realizing that all this stuff does not belong to the government, it did not belong to Saddam, it belonged to them,” he said during a lengthy interview at his London studio. “They lost their identity, they did not care about anything.”