Hartford, Connecticut: American military members, contractors and others caught with culturally significant artefacts they brought home from the Iraq war are largely not prosecuted, even as swords, artefacts and other items looted from Saddam Hussain’s palaces are turning up for sale online and at auctions.

The materials are often returned once they become known, but defenders of Iraqi historical sites and artefacts argue that won’t change anything. Smuggling cases are difficult to investigate, and prosecutors and courts generally have been satisfied to take them no further than forfeiture, said Patty Gerstenblith, director of DePaul University’s Centre for Art, Museum and Cultural Heritage Law.

“Just giving the object up is not a deterrent,” she said.

No one is suggesting that US service members removed cultural items en masse, and the souvenirs are not on par in value with the destruction wrought by Daesh, which among other things has blown up parts of the ancient Iraqi Assyrian city of Nimrud. But the Iraqi ambassador to the US, Lukman Faily, said last month that Baghdad is committed to preserving its heritage, and that the return of looted archaeological items is a national project.

Defence Department spokesman Mark Wright said the Pentagon does not track cases involving Iraq war trophies and has no indications of any related courts-martial. Such cases, he said, were not considered a major concern in the years after the invasion as the military dealt with a bloody insurgency.

McGuire Gibson, a professor of Mesopotamian archaeology at the University of Chicago, said he knows of only one prosecution, and that was a civilian: author Joseph Braude, who was caught carrying three ancient marble and alabaster seals when he returned from an Iraq visit in 2004 and ultimately pleaded guilty to smuggling. Braude, a Middle East expert who had assisted the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) earlier in his career, was sentenced to six months of house arrest.

In a recent Connecticut case, federal investigators got a tip that gold-plated items from Hussain’s palaces were up for sale and traced them to an American man who had been in Iraq as a defence contractor. Confronted by investigators, the man acknowledged taking the water urn, door knocker and soap dish.

The suspect’s background as a decorated US military veteran and his forfeiture of the items factored into prosecutors’ decision not to charge him, said Bruce Foucart, the agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in New England.

The artefacts were returned last month with dozens of other pieces, including an Iraq government seal representing Hussain’s initials in Arabic that a civilian US employee had shipped to a home in Maryland in 2004.

There is a long tradition of soldiers taking prizes home from war. In the past, some soldiers have faced larceny charges, and as concerns grew over imported weapons, the military in the Vietnam War era tightened restrictions on war trophies, which cannot be taken without approval from a service member’s chain of command. Civilian US law also prohibits the import and sale of culturally valuable material that rightfully belongs to foreign governments.

But the aftermath of the 2003 Iraq invasion made clear that the government has little interest in prosecuting service members, Gerstenblith said.

“It was virtually explicit that there was no appetite for prosecuting servicemen. There just wasn’t,” Gerstenblith said. “It’s ironic that there is still a lingering sense of war booty, spoils of war kind of thing, and that servicemen are entitled to take whatever they want.”