World>Terrorism & Security
posted November 1, 2004, updated 10:30 a.m.

Iraq 'awash with unaccounted for weapons'

Lack of troops, planning meant insurgents could 'help themselves' to weapons sites.

by Tom Regan | csmonitor.com

While the story of the 380 tons of missing explosives at Al Qaqaa weapons site in Iraq has taken several twists and turns over the past three days, experts say the "explosives missing from Al Qaqaa are only a tiny fraction of what is buried in different sites around Iraq," and that Iraq is "awash in unaccounted for weapons." Even after the US military secured some 400,000 tons of munitions, as many as 250,000 tons remain unaccounted for.

In one case, The Boston Globe reported on Saturday, a cache of hundreds of surface-to-surface warheads at the 2nd Military College in Baquba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, was left unsecured even after coalition authorities had been told of its existence. Peter Bouckaert, who heads the emergency team for New York-based Human Rights Watch, said he was shown the weapons cache by local Iraqis who wanted it removed in March of 2003. He went straight to US military authorities in Baghdad's Green Zone.


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At first, Mr. Bouckaert said, he had trouble getting anyone interested in what he had to say, because the authorities were only interested in biological or chemical weapons, He said he was also told that there were not enough troops in Iraq to secure all the stores of weapons placed around Iraq. Eventually he gave the US Army the exact GPS coorindates for the site, but when he left ten days later, the area was still not secured and insurgents were looting the facility at will.

'Looting was taking place by a lot of armed men with Kalashnikovs and rocket-propelled grenades,' Bouckaert said. He said each of the warheads contained an estimated 57 pounds of high explosives. 'Everyone's focused on Al-Qaqaa, when what was at the military college could keep a guerrilla group in business for a long time creating the kinds of bombs that are being used in suicide attacks every day,' he said.

The International Herald Tribune reports that a French journalist who visited the Al Qaqaa facility over six months after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime saw insurgents looting " vast supplies of explosives." Sarah Daniel could not indentify the material as powerful HMX explosive, but said the insurgents had "easy access to a vast weapons inventory."

"I was utterly stupefied to see that a place like that was pretty much unguarded and that insurgents could help themselves for months on end," Daniel said on Friday. "We were there for a long time and no one disturbed the group while they were loading their truck." A man who identified himself as Abu Abdallah and led the group Daniel was with, told her that his men and numerous other insurgent groups had rushed to Qaqaa after US-led troops captured Baghdad on April 9 last year. The groups stole truck-loads of material from what used to be the biggest explosive factory in the Middle East in the expectation that coalition forces would move quickly to seal it off, Daniel was told ... But much to the insurgents' surprise, Qaqaa was not sealed off by US soldiers, leading many groups to stop hoarding and instead going for regular refills of explosive materials, according to Abu Abdullah.

The US military on Friday said that a US unit had destroyed hundreds of tons of ammunition at the site, but could not say if the missing 380 tons were included in the amount destroyed. None of the weapons the miltary destroyed had the inspection seals placed on the explosives by the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency before the invasion of Iraq.

On Saturday the IAEA issued a statement to deny a report on ABC News that only three tons of explosives were missing from the Al Qaqaa site. The nuclear watchdog agency said that the figure that ABC was referring to was the explosive RDX, some of which had been cleared for use by local authorities to use in quarry blasting, not the more dangerous HMX explosive. "HMX is much more serious than RDX, it can be used as a trigger for nuclear weapons," an official said. "The HMX stocks were under IAEA seals."

The BBC reported Saturday that IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei has dismissed claims made by the Wall Street Journal last week that he released the information about the missing weapons in Iraq to influence the outcome of the US election. Mr. ElBaradei pointed out that he had told the US government about the missing explosives in confidence, but once The New York Times broke the story a week ago Sunday, he was obliged to tell the UN Security Council.

'It's total junk,' the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) told AP, when asked about the accusations. 'The timing probably is unfortunate, but there is a world out there other than the American election,' he said.

Finally, Newsweek reports that there have been few signs of HMX showing up in any of the suicide or other attacks launched by terrorists and insurgents against coaliton forces in Iraq. (Intelligence sources told Newsweek that some of the attacks launched by Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi have shown signs of HMX.) Instead, the great majority are "homemade Iraqi bombs��which currently are being planted at a rate of 30 per day ... made of artillery shells and aerial bombs looted from hundreds of other ammo depots built by Saddam [Hussein]."

Newsweek says this may be the greater problem, and the real story – that US military forces have been so slow to respond to the looting of ammunition dumps, primarily because of a lack of troops, that US defense officials fear the insurgents have access to "an unlimited supply of arms and explosives."