A tale from the crypt
U.S. News Senior Editor Julian E. Barnes was embedded with a unit of the 101st Airborne Division when it passed through the al Qaqaa weapons complex. His recollection:
On April 7, 2003, we pulled into a sprawling complex of buildings and munitions bunkers between Karbala and Baghdad. Neither the soldiers of the 101st nor I knew much about the place--and we had no inkling that, before the war, International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors had sealed the storage containers here of some 380 tons of high-yield explosives to prevent use or theft.
Weapons search. The 101st's 2nd Brigade had just finished a fierce fight in Karbala and was resetting for an assault on Baghdad. The capital, however, was already falling to the Marines and the 3rd Infantry Division, which had passed through al Qaqaa a few days earlier. Increasingly the question soldiers and reporters were asking was: Where were the weapons of mass destruction?
The morning after I arrived, the 2nd Brigade's military intelligence soldiers began a three-hour search of al Qaqaa. I tagged along. The search had the feel of a treasure hunt. The eeriest part of the day was when we entered a long dark corridor that ended at a poorly constructed cinderblock wall. "They went to a lot of trouble to seal this up," said Sgt. 1st Class Stephen Hawks. He and Capt. John Cantin pushed at the cinder blocks. With little trouble, they punched through the wall. We all stepped into a dark chamber. It was filled with tank rounds, hundreds of them. The soldiers pushed through two more poorly built walls. Crawling through the openings and dropping to the floor below, we saw hundreds and hundreds more munitions, mostly tank rounds but also possibly artillery shells and other weapons.
What we saw back then doesn't answer the central question about al Qaqaa: Were the high-yield explosives there removed before the U.S. military reached the base or looted afterward? I never saw those explosives and wouldn't have known what they were if I had. I do know that the installation, left unsecured when the 101st's 2nd Brigade moved on to Baghdad, was filled with the kind of munitions that the insurgency now uses to make their deadliest weapons, the improvised explosive device. -Julian E. Barnes
This story appears in the November 8, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.