Looting the Iraqi War Machines

Looting "sophisticated" after Saddam's fall

By James Glanz and WIlliam J. Broad

The New York Times


BAGHDAD, Iraq ?- In the weeks after Baghdad fell in April 2003, looters systematically dismantled and removed tons of machinery from President Saddam Hussein's most important weapons installations, including some with high-precision equipment capable of making parts for nuclear arms, a senior Iraqi official said last week in the government's first extensive comments on the looting.

The Iraqi official, Dr. Sami al-Araji, the deputy minister of industry, said it appeared that a highly organized operation had pinpointed specific plants looking for valuable equipment, some of which could be used for both military and civilian applications, and carted the machinery away.

Al-Araji said his account was based largely on observations by government employees and officials who either worked at the sites or lived near them.

"They came in with the cranes and the lorries, and they depleted the whole sites," al-Araji said. "They knew what they were doing; they knew what they wanted. This was sophisticated looting."

These types of facilities were cited by the Bush administration as a reason for invading Iraq, but they were left largely unguarded by coalition forces in the chaotic months after the invasion.

Al-Araji's statements came just a week after a U.N. agency revealed that approximately 90 key sites in Iraq had been looted or razed after the U.S.-led invasion.


Satellite imagery

Satellite imagery analyzed by two U.N. groups ?- the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission ?- confirm that some of the sites identified by al-Araji appear to be totally or partly stripped, according to senior officials at those agencies.

Those officials said that they could not comment on all of al-Araji's assertions, because they had been barred from Iraq since the invasion.


The disclosures by the Iraqi ministry added new information about the thefts, detailing the timing, the material that was taken and the apparent skill of the operations.

Al-Araji, whose work was respected internationally even when he worked for Saddam's government, said equipment capable of making parts for missiles as well as chemical, biological and nuclear arms was missing from eight or 10 sites that were the heart of Iraq's dormant program on unconventional weapons.

That program was the rationale for the U.S.-led invasion, but occupation forces found no unconventional arms and CIA inspectors concluded that the effort had been largely abandoned after the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Al-Araji said he had no evidence where the equipment had gone. But his account raises the possibility that the specialized machinery from the arms establishment that the war was aimed at neutralizing had made its way to the black market or was in the hands of foreign governments.

The United Nations, worried that the material could be used in clandestine bomb production, has been hunting for it unsuccessfully across the Middle East.

"Targeted looting of this kind of equipment has to be seen as a proliferation threat," said Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, a private nonprofit organization that tracks the spread of unconventional weapons.

Al-Araji said the looters probably were more interested in making money than making weapons.


Military: no comment

U.S. military officials in Baghdad did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the findings. But U.S. officials have said in the past that while they were aware of the importance of some of the installations, there was not enough military personnel to guard all of them during and after the invasion.

White House officials, apprised of the Iraqi account by The New York Times, said it was already well known that many weapons sites had been looted. They had no other comment.

In October, the Iraqi Ministry of Science and Technology wrote the U.N. atomic agency to say a stockpile of high explosives at al-Qaqaa had been lost because of "theft and looting."

News of that letter ignited a political firestorm during the U.S. presidential campaign. Privately, officials of the monitoring agencies have speculated on whether the political uproar made Baghdad reluctant to disclose more details of looting.

The peak of the organized looting, al-Araji estimates, came over a four-week period from mid-April to mid-May of 2003 as teams with flatbed trucks and other heavy equipment moved systematically from site to site. That operation was followed by rounds of less discriminating thievery.

"The first wave came for the machines," he said. "The second wave, cables and cranes. The third wave came for the bricks."

Al-Araji said that if the equipment had left the country, its most likely destination was a neighboring state.

David Albright, an authority on nuclear weaponry who is president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, D.C., said that Syria and Iran were the countries most likely to be in the market for the kind of equipment that Saddam purchased, at great cost, when he was secretly trying to build a nuclear weapon in the 1980s.

As examples of the most important sites that were looted, al-Araji named the Nida Factory, the Badr General Establishment, al-Ameer, al-Radwan, al-Hatteen, al-Kadisiya and al-Qaqaa.

Al-Qaqaa, with some 1,100 structures, manufactured powerful explosives that could be used both for conventional missile warheads and for setting off a nuclear detonation.

Last fall, Iraqi government officials warned the U.S. and international nuclear inspectors that some 377 tons of those explosives had disappeared from al-Qaqaa after the invasion. But al-Qaqaa also contained a wide variety of weapons-manufacturing machinery, including 800 pieces of chemical equipment.

The kinds of machinery at the various sites included equipment that could be used to make missile parts, chemical weapons or centrifuges essential for enriching uranium for atom bombs.

All of that "dual use" equipment also has peaceful applications ?- for example, a tool to make parts for a nuclear-implosion device or for a powerful commercial-jet turbine.

A Western diplomat familiar with satellite reconnaissance done by the International Atomic Energy Agency said it confirmed some of the Iraqi findings. For instance, he said, it showed that the Nida factory had been damaged, with some buildings removed, and some rebuilt. He added that the Badr General Establishment was nearly 100 percent dismantled.

By contrast, he said, the agency's photo analysts found al-Ameer untouched, but only as seen from overhead views. He said, "The buildings could be totally empty."

The diplomat added that the IAEA reconnaissance team found that al-Radwan was "significantly dismantled" and that Al Kadisiya had almost vanished. At the sprawling al-Hatteen base, he said: "Parts are untouched, and parts are 100 percent gone."