The Al Qa'qaa high explosives controversy concerns the removal of about 340 tonnes of high explosives HMX and RDX before, during, or after the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
The explosives, considered dangerous by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), were certified by UN weapons inspectors to be inside facilities whose doors were fastened with chains and the United Nations seal, at the Al Qa'qaa industrial complex in Iraq in 2003. By October 2004, the facility was empty.
The dispute in a nutshell
There are two main points in dispute:
- When were the explosives removed?
- Are US forces to blame for "not securing" the explosives?
Some advocates assert that the explosives were removed after invading US forces captured the facility, saying that the material was "lost" due to looting. These advocates blame either high-level commanders or local leaders and troops for failing to order the material.
Other advocates assert that the explosives were either removed by Iraq before invaders captured the facility, or properly accounted for by US forces.
MSNBC News wrote:
-
"Whether Saddam Hussein’s forces removed the explosives before U.S. forces arrived April 3, 2003, or whether they fell into the hands of looters and insurgents afterward — because the site was not guarded by U.S. troops — has become a key issue in the campaign." [1]
The Kerry campaign argues that the material was most likely removed after the US military took control of the facility. The US Bush campaign argues that the material may have been removed before the troops arrived, thus negating their responsibility.
For a timeline of events resulting in the storage and subsequent loss of the high explosives, please see Al Qa'qaa high explosives timeline.
The high explosives
The high explosives were stored under the supervision of the United Nations due to their sensitive nature and dual use in WMDs. According to the IAEA, there were 340 tonnes consisting of:
- 194.741 tonnes of HMX,
- 141.233 tonnes of RDX, and
- 5.800 tonnes of PETN.
These explosives were stored in solid crystalline form and could be used to make powerful plastic explosives, are safe to transport and do not detonate on impact. The total quantity, 341.744 tonnes, would require approximately 40 large trucks to convey. The quantity is equivalent to 753,417 pounds.
The storage facilities
The HMX was stored at the Qa'qaa Store, one of a number of facilities at the Al Qa'qaa complex in Iraq. Al Qa'Qaa is very large, occupying 28 km² of land near to Iskandariya and about 48 km south of Baghdad. It includes almost 1100 individual structures and buildings. This is about the same size as Newport, Rhode Island, Little Cayman or Bath. As a result of its large size, most accounts of the complex deal only with a specific facility located within its bounds.
The Qa'qaa Store was located at the southern end of the facility in underground bunkers. The bunker doors were sealed by IAEA officials upon being closed. The high explosives subject to the controversy were the only materials under UN seal at Al Qa'qaa.
The RDX was stored at the Al Mahaweel Stores, a site physically separate from, but administered by, Al Qa'qaa.
Satellite imagery of the main Al Qa'qaa complex (about 28 km ¹) is publicly available for 2001 from GlobalSecurity.org and for 2003 and 2004 from DigitalGlobe.
Evidence for the removal prior to US arrival
- "A U.S. Army officer came forward Friday, October 29, 2004 to say a team from his 3rd Infantry Division took about 250 tons of munitions and other material from the Al-Qaqaa arms-storage facility 10 days after Saddam Hussein's regime fell in April 2003.
- Circumstantial: An aerial photograph declassified and released by Donald Rumsfeld showing two trucks at the site after IAEA inspectors last visited it before the invasion. However, the trucks may or may not be at the right bunker and represent only a small fraction of the total shipping capacity required to move all the explosives.
- Circumstantial: Ventilation shafts serving the facility would have been easy to open and provided easy access to the explosives, according to the IAEA inspectors [2].
Evidence against the removal prior to US arrival
- videotape made by a KSTP St. Paul, Minnesota television crew embedded with U.S. 101st Airborne Division troops on April 18, 2003, nine days after Hussein's fall. The television crew accompanying US troops recorded the sealed explosives containers at the site, clearly displaying the ammunition cache of explosives and other weapons supplies, sealed with the IAEA seals which were reported 18 months ago though the footage is difficult for a layman to interpret.
Timeline
The Al Qa'qaa complex was occupied for two days by the United States Army's 3rd Infantry Division following a brief battle on April 3, 2003, shortly before the fall of Baghdad. Although no banned weapons were discovered, atropine and 2-Pam chloride — both antidotes for nerve gas — were reported found there. Thousands of bottles of white powder were also discovered, but were found to be explosives rather than chemical weapons.
On April 10, 2003, troops from the Second Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division arrived at Al Qa'qaa en route to Baghdad. They stopped overnight and moved on the following day. According to the brigade's commander, Colonel Joseph Anderson, at this point the complex showed few signs of looting or damage. Al Qa'qaa was reportedly unoccupied and unguarded until the arrival of the 75th Exploration Task Force (better known as Task Force 75 ) on May 27. By this time, according to Wathiq al-Dulaimi, a local security chief, and other local Iraqis, the complex had been thoroughly looted with enterprising locals even renting their trucks to looters. Task Force 75 found that the complex had largely been stripped of anything of value. Although they searched 32 bunkers and 87 other buildings, they found no signs of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. The team did not find any of the explosives sealed by the IAEA inspectors two months earlier.
The situation did not become publicly known for over a year afterwards, but IAEA officials reportedly warned as early as May 2003 that looting at Al Qa'qaa could be "the greatest explosives bonanza in history." Although IAEA inspectors were unable to inspect the site themselves due to the US ban on their presence, they were able to obtain commercial satellite imagery in late 2003 that showed severe damage to the facility. Two of roughly ten bunkers in which high explosives had been stored appeared to have been leveled by blasts. Other bunkers were damaged and some were untouched.
On October 10, 2004, Dr. Mohammed J. Abbas of the Iraqi Ministry of Science and Technology wrote to the IAEA to say that the Qa'qaa stockpile had been lost after April 9, 2003, because of the "theft and looting of the governmental installations due to lack of security." Nearly 340 tonnes of HDX and RDX explosives, an amount equivalent to 40 ten-ton truckloads, was said to be missing.
The news led to an immediate controversy in the 2004 U.S. presidential election. Presidential challenger John Kerry has accused President George W. Bush of presiding over an inexcusable failure to prevent the loss of the explosives, while President Bush has criticized Senator Kerry for "jump[ing] to conclusions without knowing the facts."
Many commentators expressed fears that the explosives had fallen into the hands of terrorists and would be used by the Iraqi insurgency to mount attacks against US and Iraqi troops. Many insurgent attacks have been carried out using improvised explosive devices made from military munitions, most often 122 mm artillery shells and landmines. IEDs made with high explosives are far more powerful and devastating and have been used in some of the most damaging attacks carried out in Iraq, such as the August 19, 2002 suicide attack on the U.N. headquarters, and the March 17, 2004 attack on the Mount Lebanon Hotel, both in Baghdad. It is not clear whether these attacks were mounted using explosives from Al Qa'qaa. However, on October 28, 2004 a video was released by a group calling itself "Al-Islam's Army Brigades, Al-Karar Brigade" in which a masked man claimed that "the American intelligence" had helped them to obtain a "huge amount of the explosives that were in the Al Qa'qaa facility" and that the explosives would be "use[d] against the occupation forces and those who cooperate with them in the event of these forces threatening any Iraqi city". The claim has not yet been independently verified.
While it is undisputed that the explosives are no longer in the facility, the key issues still outstanding is who took them and when. The Kerry campaign refers to them as "missing". Bush Administration officials have suggested that the Iraqi armed forces might have dispersed the explosives during the war to avoid them being destroyed in bombing raids.
On October 28, 2004, the DoD released imagery dated March 17, 2003, showing two trucks parked outside one of the 56 bunkers at Al Qa Qaa. However, the bunker nearest where the trucks were parked are not any of the nine bunkers indentified by the IAEA as containing the missing explosive stockpiles.[3] On the same day, the London Financial Times reported that the French and Russians may have been involved in the removal of the explosives from Al Qa'qaa before the war began, quoting Deputy Undersecretary for Defense John Shaw, who said "various Russian units on the eve of hostilities [helped] to orchestrate the collection of munitions and assure their transport out of Iraq via Syria". He also told the Washington Times "the organized effort was done in advance of the conflict". The Washington Times also reported that defense officials believed the Russians could also explain what happened to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs. The Russian Government has denounced this theory as "nonsense", saying that there were no Russian military in the country at the time. Shaw's theory has attracted little public support from elsewhere in the Administration.
On October 29, 2004, the New York Times reported the existence of a videotape made by a KSTP St. Paul, Minnesota television crew embedded with U.S. 101st Airborne Division troops on April 18, 2003, nine days after Hussein's fall. The television crew accompanying US troops recorded the sealed explosives containers at the site, clearly displaying the ammunition cache of explosives and other weapons supplies, sealed with the IAEA seals which were reported 18 months ago. Commentators have pointed out that the complex should certainly have been under intensive surveillance during the war as a suspected centre of WMD production. They point out that an operation involving removing 40 truckloads of materials should have been extremely visible and would probably have been attacked, had it been spotted. Some said that the materials being moved might just as easily have been WMDs being moved to the battlefront. However, there is no indication that any such transport operation was spotted by US forces. The tape displaying the sealed explosives containers, as they were being found by the 101st Airborne Division troops, was re-broadcast by ABC on October 27, and by MSNBC on October 28, 2004. The IAEA had previously noted that the HMX and RDX explosives were powerful enough to serve as the triggering material for nuclear weapons, hence the explosives were sealed by the IAEA, and reported 18 months earlier.
The Administration subsequently stated that it was a "mystery" when the explosives disappeared and that the President did not want to comment on the matter until the facts were known. An investigation has begun into how, where, and when the explosives went missing.
References
- "Huge Cache of Explosives Vanished From Site in Iraq", New York Times, October 25, 2004 [4]
- "No Check of Bunker, Unit Commander Says", New York Times, October 27, 2004
- "4 Iraqis Tell of Looting at Munitions Site in '03", New York Times, October 28, 2004
- "Russians 'may have taken Iraq explosives'", Financial Times, October 28, 2004
- "Russian tied to Iraq's missing arms", Washington Times, October 28, 2004
External links
Last updated: 05-23-2005 10:09:03
