Looting at Weapons Plants Was
Systematic, Iraqi Says
NY Times
By JAMES GLANZ and WILLIAM J. BROAD
Published: March 13, 2005
BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 12 - In the weeks after Baghdad fell in
April 2003, looters systematically dismantled and removed tons of
machinery from 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 this week in the government's first extensive comments on
the looting.
The Iraqi official, Sami al-Araji, the deputy minister of
industry, said it appeared that a highly organized operation had
pinpointed specific plants in search of valuable equipment, some
of which could be used for both military and civilian
applications, and carted the machinery away.
Dr. 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," Dr. Araji said. "They knew what they
were doing; they knew what they want. This was sophisticated
looting."
The threat posed by these types of facilities was cited by the
Bush administration as a reason for invading Iraq, but the
installations were left largely unguarded by allied forces in the
chaotic months after the invasion.
Dr. Araji's statements came just a week after a United Nations
agency disclosed that approximately 90 important sites in Iraq
had been looted or razed in that period.
Satellite imagery analyzed by two United Nations groups - the
International Atomic Energy Agency and the Monitoring,
Verification and Inspection Commission, or Unmovic - confirms
that some of the sites identified by Dr. Araji appear to be
totally or partly stripped, senior officials at those agencies
said. Those officials said they could not comment on all of Dr.
Araji's assertions, because the groups had been barred from Iraq
since the invasion.
For nearly a year, the two agencies have sent regular reports
to the United Nations Security Council detailing evidence of the
dismantlement of Iraqi military installations and, in a few
cases, the movement of Iraqi gear to other countries. In
addition, a report issued last October by the chief American arms
inspector in Iraq, Charles A. Duelfer, told of evidence of
looting at crucial sites.
The disclosures by the Iraqi ministry, however, added new
information about the thefts, detailing the timing, the material
taken and the apparent skill shown by the thieves.
Dr. Araji said equipment capable of making parts for missiles
as well as chemical, biological and nuclear arms was missing from
8 or 10 sites that were the heart of Iraq's dormant program on
unconventional weapons. After the invasion, occupation forces
found no unconventional arms, and C.I.A. inspectors concluded
that the effort had been largely abandoned after the Persian Gulf
war in 1991.
Dr. Araji said he had no evidence regarding 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.
"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 in Washington that tracks the spread of
unconventional weapons.
Dr. Araji said he believed that the looters themselves were
more interested in making money than making weapons.
The United Nations, worried that the material could be used in
clandestine bomb production, has been hunting for it, largely
unsuccessfully, across the Middle East. In one case,
investigators searching through scrap yards in Jordan last June
found specialized vats for highly corrosive chemicals that had
been tagged and monitored as part of the international effort to
keep watch on the Iraqi arms program. The vessels could be used
for harmless industrial processes or for making chemical
weapons.
American military officials in Baghdad did not respond to
repeated requests for comment on the findings. But American
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.
Daily Looting Reports
Many of Iraq's weapons sites are clustered in an area from
Baghdad's southern outskirts to roughly the town of Iskandariya,
about 30 miles south. Dr. Araji, who like many others at the
Industry Ministry kept going to work immediately after the
invasion, was able to collect observations of the organized
looting from witnesses who went to the ministry in Baghdad each
day.
The Industry Ministry also sent teams of engineers to the
looted sites in August and September of 2003 as part of an
assessment undertaken for the Coalition Provisional Authority,
the interim American-led administrative apparatus. By then,
virtually all of the most refined equipment was gone, Dr. Araji
said.
The peak of the organized looting, Dr. Araji estimates,
occurred in four weeks 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," Dr. Araji said. "The
second wave, cables and cranes. The third wave came for the
bricks."
Hajim M. al-Hasani, the minister of industry, referred
questions about looting to Dr. Araji, who commented during a
lengthy interview conducted in English in his office on Wednesday
and a brief phone interview on Friday.
Dr. 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, said that Syria and Iran were the countries most
likely to be in the market for the kind of equipment that Mr.
Hussein purchased, at great cost, when he was secretly trying to
build a nuclear weapon in the 1980's.
Losses at Enrichment Site
As examples of the most important sites that were looted, Dr.
Araji cited the Nida Factory, the Badr General Establishment, Al
Ameer, Al Radwan, Al Hatteen, Al Qadisiya and Al Qaqaa. Al
Radwan, for example, was a manufacturing plant for the uranium
enrichment program, with enormous machine tools for making highly
specialized parts, according to the Wisconsin Project. The Nida
Factory was implicated in both the nuclear program and the
manufacture of Scud missiles.
Al Qaqaa, with some 1,100 structures, manufactured powerful
explosives that could be used for conventional missile warheads
and for setting off a nuclear detonation. Last fall, Iraqi
government officials warned the United States and international
nuclear inspectors that some 377 tons of those explosives were
missing 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.
Mr. Hussein's rise to power in Iraq culminated in his military
building not only deadly missiles but many unconventional arms.
After the 1991 gulf war, international inspectors found that
Baghdad was close to making an atom bomb and had succeeded in
producing thousands of biological and chemical warheads.
Starting in 1991, the United Nations began destroying Iraq's
unconventional arms and setting up a vast effort to monitor the
country's industrial infrastructure to make sure that Baghdad
lived up to its disarmament promises. The International Atomic
Energy Agency, based in Vienna, was put in charge of nuclear
sites, and Unmovic, based in New York, was given responsibility
for chemical and biological plants as well as factories that made
rockets and missiles.
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 partly destroyed, with some buildings
removed, and some rebuilt. He added that the Badr General
Establishment was almost entirely dismantled.
By contrast, he said, the agency's photo analysts found Al
Ameer untouched, but only as seen from overhead. "The buildings
could be totally empty," he said.
The diplomat added that the atomic energy agency's
reconnaissance team found that Al Radwan was "significantly
dismantled" and that Al Qadisiya had almost vanished. At the
sprawling Hatteen base, he said, "parts are untouched, and parts
are 100 percent gone."
Before the invasion, the United Nations was monitoring those
kinds of sites. Two senior officials of the monitoring commission
said in an interview that their agency's analysis of satellite
reconnaissance photos of Iraq showed visible looting and
destruction at five of the seven sites that had been cited by Dr.
Araji.
The officials cautioned that the agency zeroed in on certain
buildings of special interest in its monitoring work on
unconventional weapons and that other structures or warehouses at
a particular identified site might still be intact.
"You might have a place with 100 buildings but we'd have an
interest in only 3 of them," an official said.
Officials at the United Nations monitoring agency said some
areas of the sprawling Qaqaa installation involved in chemical
processing had been wrecked by fire and possible extensive
looting. Unknown is the fate of such equipment there like
separators, heat exchangers, mixers and chemical reactors, all of
which can be used in making chemical weapons.
The Badr General Establishment, they said, had been
systematically razed. "It's fairly significant," one official
said of the looting and disappearance of important buildings.
The Radwan site has been dismantled, they said, with the
destruction quite extensive. And the Qadisiya small arms plant
has been razed, they said, as have the buildings the agency
monitored at the sprawling Hatteen installation. The two
officials said the agency had no information on the condition of
the Nida Factory or the Ameer site.
No Saudi or Iranian Replies
The recent monitoring agency report said Unmovic had asked
Iraq's neighbors if they were aware of whether any equipment
under agency monitoring had moved in or through their countries.
Syrian officials, it said, replied that "no relevant scrap from
Iraq had passed through Syria." The agency, the report added, had
yet to receive a response from Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Dr. Hasani, the Iraqi industry minister, said the sites of
greatest concern had been part of the Military Industrialization
Commission, a department within the ministry until it became a
separate entity in the 1990's. The commission, widely known as
the M.I.C., was dissolved after the fall of Baghdad, and
responsibility for its roughly 40 sites was divided between the
ministries of industry and finance, Dr. Hasani said. "We got 11
of them," he said.
Dr. Araji, whose tenure with the ministry goes back to the
1980's, is now involved in plans to use the sites as
manufacturing centers in what the ministry hopes will be a new
free-market economy in Iraq. He said that disappointment at
losing such valuable equipment was a prime reason that the
ministry was determined to speak frankly about what had
happened.
"We talk straight about these matters, because it's a sad
thing that this took place in Iraq," Dr. Araji said. "We need
anything that could support us here."
"When you have good factories that could support that move and
that transformation," he said, "it would be good for the economy
of the country."
In an interview, a senior atomic energy agency official said
the agency had used the reconnaissance photos to study roughly
100 sites in Iraq but that the imagery's high cost meant that the
inspectors could afford to get updates of individual sites only
about once a year.
In its most recent report to the United Nations Security
Council, in October, the agency said it "continues to be
concerned about the widespread and apparently systematic
dismantlement that has taken place at sites previously relevant
to Iraq's nuclear program."
Alarms to Security Council
Agency inspectors, in visiting other countries, have
discovered tons of industrial scrap, some radioactively
contaminated, from Iraq, the report noted. It added, however,
that the agency had been unable to track down any of the
high-quality, dual-use equipment or materials.
"The disappearance of such equipment," the report emphasized,
"may be of proliferation significance."
The monitoring commission has filed regular reports to the
Security Council since raising alarms last May about looting in
Iraq, the dismantlement of important weapons installations and
the export of dangerous materials to foreign states.
Officials of the commission and the atomic energy agency have
repeatedly called on the Iraqi government to report on what it
knows of the fate of the thousands of pieces of monitored
equipment and stockpiles of monitored chemicals and
materials.
Last fall, Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the
International Atomic Energy Agency, put public pressure on the
interim Iraqi government to start the process of accounting for
nuclear-related materials still ostensibly under the agency's
supervision. Iraq is obliged, he wrote to the president of the
Security Council on Oct. 1, to declare semiannually changes that
have occurred or are foreseen.
In interviews, officials of the monitoring commission and the
atomic energy agency said the two agencies had heard nothing from
Baghdad - with one notable exception. On Oct. 10, the Iraqi
Ministry of Science and Technology wrote to the atomic agency to
say a stockpile of high explosives at Al Qaqaa had been lost
because of "theft and looting."
During the American presidential election last fall, news of
that letter ignited a political firestorm. Privately, officials
of the monitoring commission and the atomic energy agency have
speculated on whether the political uproar made Baghdad reluctant
to disclose more details of looting.
James Glanz reported from Baghdad for this article, and
William J. Broad from New York. David E. Sanger contributed
reporting from Washington.
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