Looters Said to Have Overrun Iraq Weapons Site
Sat Oct 30, 1:08 PM ET Middle East - AP
(* Proof Bush's war in Iraq was very poorly planned)
By CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent
Looters unleashed last year by the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq (news - web sites) overran a sprawling desert complex where a bunker sealed by U.N. monitors held old chemical weapons, American arms inspectors report.
Charles Duelfer's arms teams say all U.N.-sealed structures at the Muthanna site were broken into. If the so-called Bunker 2 was breached and looted, it would be the second recent case of restricted weapons at risk of falling into militants' hands.
Officials are unsure whether this latest episode points to a threat of chemical attack, since it isn't known if usable chemical warheads were in the bunker, what may have been taken and by whom.
"Clearly, there's a potential concern, but we're unable to estimate the relative level of it because we don't know the condition of the things inside the bunker," said Ewen Buchanan, spokesman for the U.N. arms inspection agency in New York, whose specialists have been barred from Iraq since the invasion.
Chief arms hunter Duelfer told The Associated Press by e-mail Friday from Iraq that he was unaware of "anything of importance" looted from the chemical weapons complex. The report his Iraq Survey Group issued on Oct. 6 said, however, that it couldn't vouch for the fate of old munitions at Muthanna.
One chemical weapons expert said even old, weakened nerve agents — in this case sarin — could be a threat to unprotected civilians.
The weapons involved would be pre-1991 artillery rockets filled with sarin, or their damaged remnants — weapons that were openly declared by Iraq and were under U.N. control until security fell apart with the U.S. attack. They are not concealed arms of the kind President Bush (news - web sites) claimed Iraq had, but which were never found.
In its Oct. 6 report, summarizing a fruitless search for banned weapons in Iraq, Duelfer's group disclosed that widespread looting occurred at Muthanna, 35 miles northwest of Baghdad, in the aftermath of the fall of the Iraqi capital in April 2003.
A little-noted annex of the 985-page report said every U.N.-sealed location at the desert installation had been breached in the looting spree, and "materials and equipment were removed."
Bunker 2 at Muthanna State Establishment, once Iraq's central chemical weapons production site, was put under U.N. inspectors' control in early 1991 after it was heavily damaged by a U.S. precision bomb in the first Gulf War (news - web sites). At the time, Iraq said 2,500 sarin-filled artillery rockets had been stored there.
The U.N. teams sealed up the bunker with brick and reinforced concrete, rather than immediately attempt the risky job of clearing weapons or remnants from under a collapsed roof and neutralizing them.
A CIA (news - web sites) analysis, not done on site, hypothesized in 1999 that all the sarin must have been destroyed by fire. But a U.S. General Accounting Office (news - web sites) review last June questioned that analysis, and the United Nations (news - web sites), whose teams were there, said the extent of destruction was never determined.
The looting at Muthanna, a 35-square-mile complex in the heart of the embattled "Sunni Triangle," is the latest example of how sensitive Iraqi sites — previously under U.N. oversight — were exposed to potential plundering by militants or random looters in Iraq's wartime chaos.
Last Monday, U.N. officials confirmed that almost 380 tons of sophisticated explosives — also under U.N. seal — had disappeared from a military-industrial site south of Baghdad, a location left unsecured by U.S. troops advancing to Baghdad in April 2003.
Thousands of tons of other munitions are also unaccounted for across Iraq. The issue has become a flashpoint in the U.S. presidential race.
Buchanan said a U.N. team inspected the sealed Muthanna bunker on Dec. 4, 2002, and inspectors continued to visit Muthanna up to March 14, 2003, although they did not view the bunker that day. Four days later, on the eve of the U.S. invasion, the U.N. monitors had to leave Iraq.
As for when the sealed bunker may have been breached, the report said, "The facilities at the southern section" — the bunker area — "were removed by unknown entities between April and June 2003." It didn't elaborate, but presumably the first U.S. search teams arrived at Muthanna in June and discovered the looting.
"The (Iraq Survey Group) is unable to unambiguously determine the complete fate of old munitions, materials and chemicals produced and stored there," the Duelfer report said.
The three-week-old report also said, without elaboration, that chemical munitions "are still stored there" and that warheads, apparently not filled with chemical agent, "are still being looted."
In a brief e-mail responding to AP questions on Friday, however, Duelfer said his inspectors "never found anything of importance looted from the cruciform bunkers," Muthanna's huge cross-shaped storage bunkers. He also said piles of sand dumped onto bunker contents in the past were a deterrent to theft.
The group's formal report, on the other hand, indicated the Americans don't know what may have been taken from the sarin-warhead or other bunkers. "The bunkers' contents have yet to be confirmed," said the 24-page annex, whose photographs show bricked-up entrances breached by man-sized holes.
The report also said unspecified bunkers tested positive for the presence of chemical weapons agents.
Duelfer, an ex-U.N. inspector and now CIA adviser, told the AP the Muthanna site, 30 miles north of the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah, is currently being "monitored" by the U.S. military.
In a quarterly report to the U.N. Security Council on Aug. 27, six weeks before Duelfer's disclosures, U.N. inspectors had called attention to Muthanna's sealed bunker, and said 16 other sealed structures and areas there "contained potentially hazardous items and material." Buchanan said those include toxic chemicals and waste, but not chemical weapons agents.
Nerve agents like sarin can cause convulsions, paralysis and respiratory failure. Their potency degrades over time, but "even with degradation, the weapons may be dangerous even if there's half as much nerve agent now as before," said British chemical weapons expert Richard Guthrie.
Guthrie, of Sweden's Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, said weakened sarin might be useless against military units in the field, but still be a threat to unprotected civilians in confined spaces.
The Muthanna complex, in desolate flatlands populated by Bedouin camel herders, produced huge amounts of nerve agents and the blister agent mustard in the 1980s, when the weapons were used against Iranian troops and rebellious Iraqi civilians during the Iran-Iraq War.
Under U.N. resolutions banning Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, the U.N. inspectors who moved in after the 1991 Gulf War oversaw destruction of 22,000 chemical weapons at Muthanna by 1998, when they withdrew from Iraq in a dispute over access and CIA infiltration of the U.N. operation.
When U.N. inspectors returned after four years, Muthanna's sealed locations appeared not to have been tampered with, Buchanan said.
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On the Net:
Duelfer report: foia.cia.gov
U.N. report: un.org |
