A mess of missing ordnance
In Iraq, weapons, weapons everywhere--and free for the taking
It came out of nowhere to dominate the final week of the presidential campaign. But the disclosure that tons of advanced explosives had somehow vanished from an Iraqi weapons dump came as no surprise to David Kay. The former chief U.S. weapons inspector says there has been looting at scores of unguarded Iraqi weapons dumps since the American invasion. "During the fall of 2003, what you would see was Iraqis going in at night, individually and in trucks," Kay told U.S. News . "They would pull ordnances out and drive off." Security was so bad after Saddam Hussein's regime fell, Kay recalled, that his team was often shot at by insurgents when they went to inspect the sites: "There were just not enough boots on the ground, and the military didn't give it a high enough priority to stop the looting. Tens of thousands of tons of ammunition were being looted, and that is what is fueling the insurgency."
Arsenal. What fueled the heated exchanges between President Bush and Sen. John Kerry last week was something quite different. Within hours of the disclosure of the missing explosives from the al Qaqaa weapons dump, Kerry used the report to ratchet up his criticism of Bush for his alleged mismanagement of the Iraq war and the planning for the postconflict phase. After three days of ignoring the issue, Bush finally responded, blasting Kerry for making "wild charges" about the missing explosives. Absent from all the campaign rhetoric was any hard evidence showing whether the explosives were taken from the weapons facility before or after the fall of Baghdad, on April 9, 2003. Despite a Pentagon investigation, the answer to when the explosives were taken may never be known conclusively.
But secret Defense Intelligence Agency documents obtained by U.S. News confirm Kay's account of extensive looting at Iraqi weapons sites and indicate that the problem was much larger than the explosives taken from al Qaqaa. A DIA report dated Nov. 9, 2003, notes that the "[v]ast majority of explosives and ordnance used in anti-Coalition improvised explosive devices/IED s have come from pilfered Iraqi ammunition stockpiles and prewar established . . . caches." Another report, a "special analysis" prepared by a joint Defense Department intelligence task force last December, reflected similar concerns. The report said that the number of attacks on coalition forces and Iraqi citizens jumped from 115 the previous May to more than 1,060 in November and concluded that the weapons being used by the insurgents were not limited to "small arms, mortars, rockets, and explosives" but included surface-to-air missiles. The report concluded that attacks using IED s "have grown at a sustained rate . . . accounting for the largest percentage of coalition casualties." It also provided chilling evidence of the range of weapons available to the insurgents. They "retain access to virtually all the weapons systems and ordnances previously controlled by the Iraqi military, security and intelligence assets," the report concluded. "Unsecured arms depots and storage sites, in addition to open and black market availability of weapons and ammunition, eliminate the need for the [insurgents] to maintain a formidable arsenal."
Despite the political brawl over the missing explosives from al Qaqaa, the larger question is why Pentagon war planners made no more extensive plans for controlling Saddam's vast weapons stores. Before the U.S.-led invasion, there were some 650,000 tons of ammunition in thousands of sites around Iraq. Pentagon officials say they have destroyed 400,000 tons. Of all the Iraqi weapons sites, however, al Qaqaa was among the most important. It had been at the center of some of Saddam's efforts to develop chemical and nuclear weaponry. After looting at Iraq's main nuclear complex in April 2003, the International Atomic Energy Agency warned U.S. officials about the possibility of similar activity at al Qaqaa and cautioned specifically about the high explosives stored there. The three types of explosives--HMX, RDX, and PETN--can be used to blow up buildings and airplanes and to trigger nuclear weapons.
"Theft and looting." U.S. troops visited al Qaqaa in early April of last year, but the troops, whose mission was to get to Baghdad and take the city, made only a cursory search of the facility, which is about the size of Manhattan and has 32 bunkers and 87 separate installations. Members of the 101st Airborne Division, which spent time there between April 7 and April 10, said that soldiers performed a security sweep of just a small part of the facility and "did not receive orders to search and secure the entire facility or search for high explosive-type munitions."
Pentagon inspection teams visited al Qaqaa in early May, and an Army Reserve unit charged with searching for high explosives arrived on May 27. Kay says that the unit noted in a report that it searched the entire facility but could find no explosives. Kay's team searched the still-unsecured facility at the end of June and confirmed the reserve unit's findings. "By the time we had gotten on the ground," he said, "the site was heavily looted [and] essentially destroyed."
Iraq's interim government told the IAEA that the explosive material was lost "after April 9, 2003, through theft and looting of the government installations due to a lack of security." Pentagon and the White House officials have maintained, alternately, that some of the munitions might have been destroyed by U.S. troops or that the munitions were probably removed, possibly by Saddam's army, just prior to the invasion or during it. Kay doesn't buy the latter thought: "It's hard for me to believe that the U.S. military would not have noticed 40 to 60 truckloads moving out of this site."
This story appears in the November 8, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.