Troops told of looting at ammo dump, sources say

WASHINGTON – The more than 320 tons of missing Iraqi high explosives at center stage in the U.S. presidential election are only a fraction of the weapons-related material that’s disappeared in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion last year.

Huge amounts of arms and ammunition were stolen from military sites, and there’s “ample evidence” that Iraqi insurgents are firing looted weapons at U.S. troops and using some of them in car bombs and improvised explosive devices, said a senior U.S. intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

U.N. officials also are concerned about the disappearance of sensitive equipment and controlled materials that could be used to develop nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.

“If this equipment is finding itself on the open market, then anybody with money can buy it,” said Dimitri Perricos, acting head of the U.N. Monitoring and Verification Commission (UNMOVIC), the U.N. weapons inspection agency.

The CIA has convened a “mini-taskforce” of experts to assess precisely what equipment is gone and what threat it could pose if it fell into the wrong hands, said two U.S. officials.

In a new disclosure, the senior U.S. military officer and another U.S. official, who also spoke on condition he not be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter, said that an Iraqi working for U.S. intelligence alerted U.S. troops stationed near the al Qaqaa weapons facility that the installation was being looted shortly after the fall of Baghdad on April 9, 2003.

But, they said, the troops took no apparent action to halt the pillaging.

“That was one of numerous times when Iraqis warned us that ammo dumps and other places were being looted and we weren’t able to respond because we didn’t have anyone to send,” said a senior U.S. military officer who served in Iraq.

An ABC television station in Minnesota reported that one of its camera crews embedded with the 101st Airborne Division might have filmed some of the high explosives after arriving on al Qaqaa’s perimeter on April 18. Experts at the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. agency that was monitoring al Qaqaa because the missing explosives could have been used to trigger a nuclear weapon, are examining the videotape.

The disclosure appeared to contradict the Bush administration’s suggestion that Saddam’s regime may have removed the high explosives between the last U.N. inspection of al Qaqaa on March 15 and the arrival at the installation of 3rd Infantry Division troops on April 3. The U.S.-backed interim Iraqi government contends that the high explosives disappeared sometime after the fall of Baghdad on April 9.

The Defense Department on Thursday released a satellite photograph taken on March 17 that shows two trucks parked outside one of the 56 bunkers at the al Qaqaa complex, and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said U.S. reconnaissance would have detected any major effort to loot the complex.

“We would have seen anything like that,” Rumsfeld said in a radio interview. “The idea that it was suddenly looted and moved out, all these tons of equipment, I think that is at least debatable.”

However, a senior U.S. intelligence official said, U.S. reconnaissance coverage of Iraqi weapons complexes and military movements was most intense before and during the U.S.-led invasion, while smaller-scale looting after the fall of Baghdad might have evaded detection.

Many U.S. officials and other experts blame the massive disappearance of Iraqi weapons-related materials on the Pentagon’s failure to anticipate the waves of looting and lawlessness that convulsed Iraq after Saddam’s ouster in April 2003.

They also cited decisions by Rumsfeld and retired Gen. Tommy Franks, the overall commander of the invasion, to deploy far fewer U.S. troops to stabilize the country than U.S. ground commanders had sought.