BAGHDAD, Iraq: Well-wishers have returned more than 1,000 works of modern art looted from Baghdad's top gallery as curators continue the painstaking task of restoring what was once one of the Middle East's finest collections.

Some 6,870 works were stolen from the Iraqi Art Museum in the aftermath of the 2003 US invasion, which ousted Saddam but threw the capital open to a wave of lawlessness that all but destroyed the city's cultural life.

Now, however, friends of the museum have begun to track down and return hundreds of oil paintings, watercolors, drawings and sculptures representing the work of some of the finest Iraqi artists of the past two centuries.

"We have managed to recover 1,130 pieces from people who bought these works in Amman and Baghdad, perhaps not knowing they were looted, and have now returned them," said museum director Huda An-Nuaimi.

"The paintings were stripped from their frames and folded in a delicate and careful way," Nuaimi said, adding she suspected the gang must have had knowledge of the collection and the layout of the gallery.