Weapons of Conventional Destruction
Macomber, Shawn
T 4:45 P.M., ON AUGUST 19 OF LAST YEAR, a mad bomber drove a cement truck packed with explosives down a dusty road and straight into the Canal Hotel in Baghdad, the United Nations' temporary...
...Saddam may have created a more varied series of weapons drops than any other despot in history, ranging from filling civilians' basements and bunkers to massive, 50-square mile complexes...
...Worse, because many of these weapons have been stored in civilian neighborhoods, they have to be transported some distance to be detonated...
...United States, along with many others, would all have been in the game—directly or indirectly, depending T HERE'S A BIT OF BLACK HUMOR you'll hear time on whether you choose to believe the alibis...
...A few days later, three missiles hit a telePHOTOS: OFFICE OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS, US ARMY T 4:45 P.M., ON AUGUST 19 OF LAST YEAR, a mad bomber drove a cement truck packed with explosives down a dusty road and straight into the Canal Hotel in Baghdad, the United Nations' temporary headquarters...
...The newspaper also reports that documents show that "two North Korean officials met the head of [Iraq's weapons procurement company] Al Bashair...in Damascus a month before the war to discuss Iraq's payment of $10 million for `major components' for ballistic missiles...
...In the aftermath, US...
...In the aftermath, US...
...Upon detonation, the bombs killed nearly 200 people and wounded more than 400...
...More recently, during the celebration of Ashura, the holiest day of the Shiite calendar, in early March, three suicide attackers wound their way into the faithful throngs gathered in Baghdad and Karbala...
...Because of weapons "seepage," even humanitarian missions have to enter Iraqi locales ready to rumble...
...The rest are turned over to the U.S...
...Before the war began the Ra'athictc had seized his home and sent him packing...
...Nearly 2,000 people—more than half of them Iraqis—are employed at six demolition sites...
...He was shocked by the location of some of the stockpiles: city playgrounds, soccer stadiums, houses, even schools and hospitals...
...If supplying munitions to Saddam were an the August 1990 U.N...
...But several State Department and Defense Department officials have said, under condition of anonymity, that it's quite likely...
...ammunition from 2002, with Jordanian markings on the box to disguise it...
...To give some perspective, he explains that a large truck jammed full of explosives does not amount to "one-hundredth of a percent of the total unsecured weapons available...
...Official statistics are difficult to obtain since Iraq's Health Minister ordered a halt to the official tallying of civilian casualties in December, but a UNICEF report states that children continue to be "injured or killed on a daily basis" by unexploded ordnance...
...But this came as little comfort either to the terrorized Iraqis or to the troops, who were just beginning to make connections and establish relationships with the locals...
...In late February, nearly a year after the second Gulf War began, a reporter for the "Common Ground" world affairs radio program was shocked when during a visit to Al Musayib (made famous by Colin Powell in his U.N...
...An Iraqi citizen living near the facility was noticeably more emotional...
...high-tech tracking systems, rocket-propelled As a former surrogate of both the U.S...
...oil-for-food" program...
...Iraqi civilians are prepared to help—for a price...
...One mistake could kill everyone on a team...
...They had pushed away international aid, prolonged the suffering of the Iraqi people, and dealt a stinging rebuke to those attempting to plant democracy in the Middle East...
...THE STOCKPILES are not only the primary source of arms and explosives for homemade bombs but also tempting targets in themselves...
...Iraq's military obtained four optical scanners from Massachusetts-based Cambridge Technology Inc., which "can be adapted to help divert laser-guided missiles...
...New caches of weapons are found daily...
...You see this stuff all over the place, and, clearly, somehow weapons were transferred to the Iraqis that they had no business having...
...The hope is that all six demolition sites will eventually dispose of 100 tons of ordnance a day...
...Guerrillas, armed to the gills, had won a significant victory...
...A short time later, the Baghdad headquarters of the Red Cross was damaged by a car bomb, leading both the U.N...
...These are not ernment...
...Working on a budget of nearly $300 million, it has been given the task of overseeing the destruction of captured munitions in Iraq...
...Could it be that he walked into those meetings with some documents that helped Chirac make his decision...
...It turns out that wanton misuse of gunpowder and such during peacetime can be a serious deterrent to "winning hearts and minds...
...Every time one of these coalition-trained recruits is maimed or killed, it postpones the day when Iraq can be returned to Iraqis...
...It's tough...
...You recognize the system, but you have no idea how it got there, or what hands it went through...
...More than 300 of the small, 30-pound missiles have been turned in so far, even though such missiles regularly sell for $5,000 on the black market...
...and the Red Cross to pull their entire staffs out of the capital city...
...Another possibility might be Yugoslavia after the collapse of Communism: the Serbs were left with all the arms and took the opportunity to wage war on their weaker neighbors...
...forces detained would-be suicide bombers in Basra and Najaf and defused a huge bomb in Kirkuk along a road Shiites had planned to march down...
...They shipped close to 400 of the weapons to Baghdad via Syria, up until December 2002...
...It goes like this: drowned out the danger posed by massive unguarded Before the war, Iraq was an ammo dump with a gov- stockpiles of conventional weapons...
...So we don't just have the worries of making sure we take all the precautions necessary in destroying the weapons, but we also have a fairly tricky security situation on our hands as well...
...Army Corps of Engineers...
...T HE SOLUTION IS CLEAR: secure whatever weapons are intended for the Iraqi army and destroy the rest...
...The blast killed 22 civilians, among them Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN...
...How Iraq obtained these weapons remains murky, but a Russian weapons expert who has made a career out of tracking arms traffic from the Soviet Union and other nations told TASthat the Iraqi illicit weapons trade was not as complicated as it seems...
...Unsecured weapons have been known to "cook off," exploded by the heat of the sun, and, without warning, firing in every direction...
...Leaving their environment a mess is not part of our mission...
...Saddam had tremendous leverage with these states, and by all accounts he used it to buy all sorts of wonderful toys...
...csi...
...Tough" would seem to be an understatement...
...munitions...
...A short time later, the Baghdad headquarters of the Red Cross was damaged by a car bomb, leading both the U.N...
...WOST-EMBARGO, ILLEGAL WEAPONS are everyhere in Iraq...
...A lot of what these people end up dumping on the ground are crude Chinese versions of our weapons," Dickenson explains...
...army now is holding off such a grisly outcome, in part by keeping the locals from getting at the country's caches of weapons...
...The answer now is, we don't know...
...Our convoys encounter improvised explosive devices all the time...
...Even trivial seepage from stockpiles that large is more than enough to sustain the enemy," says John Pike, founder of GlobalSecurityorg...
...military and the coalition to clean this up...
...With the fuses that you saw over there, you could fill a car with two bags of that stuff, light a fuse, and you'd have a car bomb...
...relics of the Iran-Iraq and other nations more than willing to ship them in war are many tons of weapons manufactured after nonstop...
...The Jordanian government proved unwilling to halt this illicit trade because of the yearly $300 million in cut-rate oil flowing in from Iraq outside the U.N...
...In the event that these demonstrations do occur and armed agitators manage to provoke a response, there is a real danger of the populace turning against U.S...
...Just from the materials you saw over there...
...The process of securing Iraqi weapons was difficult, he said, because "the locals want it, we want it, you know, other military forces want it...
...A recent Human Rights Watch report captures this "escalation...
...embargo and, therefore, supplied illegally...
...Earhart remains upbeat and believes he's doing something good...
...Our guys are getting shot at daily...
...Once while on patrol near the Tigris River, Dickenson was flagged down by an Iraqi farmer who had one simple request: "Please let me move back into my home...
...The potential powder keg that is modern Iraqbears some resemblance to Afghanistan, when the Soviets pulled out and left the heavily armed warlords to fight amongst themselves...
...military teams check ammo dumps for booby traps, then comb through and catalogue the weapons...
...Well, when our forces came in they just moved right through, took out all the bad guys and left the ordnance," Capt...
...Environmen-tal and local safety concerns are also paramount to the Corps...
...A few days later, three missiles hit a telePHOTOS: OFFICE OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS, US ARMY T 4:45 P.M., ON AUGUST 19 OF LAST YEAR, a mad bomber drove a cement truck packed with explosives down a dusty road and straight into the Canal Hotel in Baghdad, the United Nations' temporary headquarters...
...Ashes from burned documents greeted David Kay and others at every turn, and computer hard drives were decimated...
...The total amount of explosives being used against the coalition is relatively small...
...Documents uncovered by the Los Angeles Times showed the extent of this leverage: A Polish company, Evax, signed four contracts with Iraq for surface-to-air Volga/SA-2 missile engines...
...and again if you talk to U.S...
...For instance, very few pistols remain to be secured...
...When those weapons arrived smugglers packed them onto trucks and delivered them into Iraq...
...Still, failure to locate WMDs has created the impression, amplified by press accounts and U.S...
...More recently, in December two army ordnance experts separately came under fire and were killed while trying to disable "hot" arms at ammo dumps...
...THE RISK IS NOT LIMITED to malevolent attacks...
...With electricity and fuel for cooking and heating scarce this past winter, Iraqis found it hard to resist ripping wooden crates apart for firewood and discarding the weapons...
...troops were disposing some of Iraq's arsenal when twice they accidentally exploded chemical weapons along with conventional weapons (the Iraqis had mixed them together...
...In Mosul, a British security company is paying a 230 member "Sheik Force" to patrol ammo dumps, and the American military is offering a $500 reward to anyone willing to turn in shoulder fired surface-to-air missiles...
...All we want is security," Ali Hamsa Sultan told the reporter...
...And an explosion in an ammo dump can quickly escalate...
...It's just a mess...
...But tern had been restored...
...Upon detonation, the bombs killed nearly 200 people and wounded more than 400...
...It's hard to explain the kind of environment we're trying to get this job done in," Glenn Earhart, the Corps' chief of international operations, said...
...domestic squabbles, that Saddam's Iraq was a beast with no teeth...
...Within two months, the number of blue-hatted employees organizing humanitarian aid in the capital city dropped from 600 to 60...
...French bomb fuses from 2001 have been found, as have Ukrainian Cornet anti-tank missiles...
...troops...
...Half a dozen people were killed, and angry Iraqis took to the streets, blaming the incident on the occupying forces...
...This includes rusted, rotted, old, and unstable weapons often without any sort of safety devices...
...American mortars have mechanisms that prevent the rounds from exploding in close quarters...
...Brass casings from scavenged artillery shells are removed for sale, often spilling unstable warhead propellant onto the ground, where it can seep into the soil...
...and the grenades, and bombs weighing in at hundreds of USSR, the Iraqi government may not have had much pounds...
...A student in Canada bought and shipped the scanners to Jordan, under the pretext of donating them to a university, "whose name he now says he cannot remember...
...Whether it will be made public is another story...
...forces detained would-be suicide bombers in Basra and Najaf and defused a huge bomb in Kirkuk along a road Shiites had planned to march down...
...In November, insurgents killed two workers from EOD Technologies with a roadside bomb...
...Muhammad Keun Jiheli, 16, suffered burns over more than half his body and killed four members of his family when he brought home a piece of ordnance for cooking fuel...
...Now it's just an ammo dump...
...soldiers had blocked vehicles from driving near the crowds for fear of a car bomb attack, so the bombers filled five wooden pushcarts to the brim with explosives...
...But that's only a start...
...More recently, during the celebration of Ashura, the holiest day of the Shiite calendar, in early March, three suicide attackers wound their way into the faithful throngs gathered in Baghdad and Karbala...
...We don't want anyone of our fellow citizens to get killed...
...In a countrywhere temperatures can reach above 120 degrees, exposed weapons and propellant do not require the human element to cause catastrophe...
...Just as civilians looted everything from Saddam's palaces to the Ministry of Information in the days after the war, so too have they scavenged these weapons sites...
...But fiddling with a weapons cache is a far deadlier proposition than poaching an old desk...
...Guerrillas, armed to the gills, had won a significant victory...
...Experts outside the program believe that it will be many years before Iraq is rid of Saddam's arsenal...
...high com phone exchange building in Baghdad, disabling inter- Olympic sport Russia would have walked away with national phone service across Iraq just after the sys- the gold, China the silver, and France the bronze...
...The Iraq/Syrian pipeline provided Syria with about $1 billion in oil, before U.S...
...And more often than not, a State Department official told TAS, the trigger that was pulled belonged to a weapon looted from the arms dumps...
...This is a large job, and one at which the army has been only partially successful...
...It didn't stop there...
...high commissioner for human rights...
...soldiers, weapons Recriminations over the failure to locate experts, and government officials trying to Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) have sort out Iraq's deadliest conundrum...
...But every once in a while he pauses and acknowledges the magnitude of the task ahead...
...We don't want a repeat of the chemical weapons situation from 1991...
...HIS FEY IMPRESSION is far removed from the facts that have been discovered on the ground...
...We're slowly peeling back supply networks," he says...
...The military estimates there are between 650,000 and one million tons of conventional weapons distributed throughout Iraq...
...Two-axle Urals troop carriers, which were not produced in Russia prior to 1995, have also been spotted burnt out along the road to Baghdad...
...Dickenson calls the large volume "an insane amount of arms for these guys to have had...
...officials later said the attack was likely meant to kill many more civilians than it did...
...In many instances, it was made to look like looting, but thieves would never destroy a computer—they sell for far too much on the street to do that...
...Crude because they lack a lot of the safety features of U.S...
...They've killed hundreds of Iraqis willing to work with the U.S...
...Pike of GlobalSecurity.org argues that despite efforts to cover it up, the truth is likely to emerge...
...It's all over the place...
...Many in the Corps are optimistic that they can have the majority of the ordnance destroyed by late 2005...
...However, "drop a Chinese-made round on the ground and it's likely to blow...
...Kickouts from these disposal explosions can fly 300 to 400 yards away, so it's very delicate work," Earhart said...
...Some will be passed on to the Iraqi army...
...Imagine taking 60 percent of the military's munitions and dumping them into California and you'll begin to get some idea...
...Shawn Macomber is a reporter for The American Spectator...
...presentation), he stumbled across a 10-square-mile compound that was not only unguarded, but filled with enough weapons and propellant to bring down several large buildings...
...Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Germany, North All this was made possible by weapons the previ- Korea, Singapore, South Africa, and, yes, even the ous regime had left just lying around...
...We found most of these weapons in highly inappropriate places," Marine Reserve Company 1st Sgt...
...soldiers had blocked vehicles from driving near the crowds for fear of a car bomb attack, so the bombers filled five wooden pushcarts to the brim with explosives...
...Ron Dickenson, recently back from Iraq, explained...
...As a result tens of thousands of troops may have been exposed to sarin nerve gas, which famously killed 11 people in a Tokyo subway when the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult attempted to start its own mini-Apocalypse by dropping lunch boxes and soft drink containers full of the deadly gas on packed train cars...
...It's like some- merely pistols and rifles...
...U.S...
...In several instances, children have set off catastrophic and deadly explosions by playing in ammo dumps...
...After all, diplomat James Baker was able to get France to forgive 60 percent of Iraq's debt without the monumental struggle that was expected...
...An explosion in Karbala at a fedayeen training center collapsed the building on scavenging Iraqis, killing four...
...Military investigators upon arrival in Iraq found, unsurprisingly, much of the paper trail destroyed...
...The dumps are lousy with cluster bombs that the Russians did not even begin manufacturing until 1993, as well as Russian AA-8 air to air missiles...
...The Corps has taken over much of its own security detail, but not all, since, as one might imagine, a convoy of trucks full of ordnance might as well be a big red bull's-eye for guerrillas...
...Last April attackers fired flares into a weapons depot in Baghdad, setting off several medium-sized rounds and launching a Frog-7 missile into a nearby neighborhood...
...It's a danger to our children, it's a danger to us, it's a danger to everyone who comes to Iraq...
...In March 1991, weeks after the first Gulf War ended, U.S...
...The coalition already has potentially embarrassing information on our detractors, but there is no particular desire to publicize those findings...
...When the soldiers investigated the farmer's house, they found it full of heavy weaponry "It was stocked with French-built Roland missiles, which may or may not have been post-embargo," Dickenson said...
...Perhaps those documents are being wielded, even now, by the Bush administration in quiet but firm diplomatic meetings...
...This is necessary to protect lives, but it is not exactly the best way to go about dispelling the perception that Iraq is under a foreign occupation...
...Trained U.S...
...Also, so long as well-armed guerrillas or foreign jihadis can infiltrate legitimate Iraqi demonstrations and fire a couple rounds at the troops, what Westerners would think of as normal political freedoms will be restricted...
...high commissioner for human rights...
...military engineers shut it down...
...For those keeping score, Saddam's arsenal could end up being 60 percent as large as the entire conventional weapons inventory of the U.S armed services...
...Caches are still being found everyday," he admits...
...They had pushed away international aid, prolonged the suffering of the Iraqi people, and dealt a stinging rebuke to those attempting to plant democracy in the Middle East...
...So far, about 350,000 tons have been secured, and those are vulnerable to surreptitious theft...
...We're there to do a good job and help the Iraqi people...
...The average car or truck bomb takes maybe a quarter or half ton of explosives...
...Iraqis are not happy about this situation...
...And since last August the Corps and its contractor teams have destroyed an impressive 50,000 tons of weapons...
...Alex Ursel of the 82nd Airborne told him, adding that the situation in this and many other Iraqi weapons depots was a "free for all...
...Disposing of weapons leaves little room for error...
...T 4:45 P.M., ON AUGUST 19 OF LAST YEAR, a mad bomber drove a cement truck packed with explosives down a dusty road and straight into the Canal Hotel in Baghdad, the United Nations' temporary headquarters...
...The blast killed 22 civilians, among them Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN...
...The blast killed 22 civilians, among them Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN...
...Pike cautions that anything portable from the stockpiles has probably already found its way into the hands of Allah only knows who...
...We want the U.S...
...The cost in lives was terrible, and in the aftermath of the explosion some 120 relief and Non- Government Organizations (NGOs) evacuated staff from Baghdad...
...All middlemen in countries like Jordan and Syria had to do was order perfectly legal weapons shipments to their home country...
...We're also making sure we only detonate the things we are supposed to...
...Convoys en route to rebuild schools roll into towns in armored caravans with soldiers manning 50-caliber machine gun turrets on the tops of trucks...
...Iraqi forces may not have done much of a job defending Baghdad, but they certainly worked overtime eliminating evidence...
...the term does encompass one turned on a spigot in Iraq during the Iran-Iraq crude weaponry but sophisticated Western military war, and never bothered to turn it off," says John hardware also falls under this category, including Shaw, deputy undersecretary of defense for shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles, sea mines, International Security...
...There was also U.S...
...and the Red Cross to pull their entire staffs out of the capital city...
...But that fix can be costly...
...The munitions gap leaves a massive number of sites open to looting both by cash-strapped civilians and by insurgents waging attacks on coalition forces...
...Within two months, the number of blue-hatted employees organizing humanitarian aid in the capital city dropped from 600 to 60...
...The cost in lives was terrible, and in the aftermath of the explosion some 120 relief and Non- Government Organizations (NGOs) evacuated staff from Baghdad...
...In recent months, the insurgents have made recruits for the Iraqi Army and police force their major target...
...Only the presence of the U.S...
...It didn't stop there...
...The long and torturous route these weapons took to their final resting places in school basements and hospital waiting rooms may never be fully known...
...of a weapons program but found plenty of Western Amid the Soviet and U.S...
Vol. 37 • April 2004 • No. 3
