One of the first U.S. military units to reach the Al-Qaqaa military installation south of Baghdad after the invasion of Iraq did not have orders to search for the nearly 400 tons of explosives that are missing from the site, the unit spokesman said Tuesday.
When troops from the 101st Airborne Division’s 2nd Brigade arrived at the Al-Qaqaa base a day or so after other coalition troops seized Baghdad on April 9, 2003, there were already looters in the facility, said Lt. Col. Fred Wellman, deputy public affairs officer for the unit.
The soldiers “secured the area they were in and looked in a limited amount of bunkers to ensure chemical weapons were not present in their area,” Wellman wrote in an e-mail message. “Bombs were found but not chemical weapons in that immediate area.
“Orders were not given from higher to search or to secure the facility or to search for HE (high-explosive) type munitions, as they were everywhere in Iraq,” he wrote.
While Wellman said the 101st Airborne troops were the first at Al-Qaqaa after the U.S.-led invasion, NBC News reported Tuesday night that Army 3rd Infantry Division troops arrived several days earlier.
Quoting unidentified Army officials, NBC said 3rd Infantry soldiers got to the weapons complex April 4, finding “looters everywhere” carrying what they could on their backs. The troops searched bunkers and found conventional weapons but no high explosives, NBC quoted the officials as saying.
NBC said that with more than 1,000 buildings, the Al-Qaqaa complex was so large it was not clear the troops even saw the bunkers that might have held the explosives.
Pentagon officials could not be reached to comment on the NBC account. A spokesman for the 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Stewart, Ga., said the unit was checking on whether any other unit was at Al-Qaqaa before the 101st.
NBC correspondent Lai Ling Jew, who was with the 101st, told MSNBC that “there wasn’t a search” of Al-Qaqaa.
“The mission that the brigade had was to get to Baghdad,” she said. “As far as we could tell, there was no move to secure the weapons, nothing to keep looters away.”
Iraq’s Ministry of Science and Technology told the International Atomic Energy Agency two weeks ago that the explosives had vanished from the former military installation as a result of “theft and looting … due to lack of security.” The letter said the explosives were stolen sometime after coalition forces took control of Baghdad on April 9, 2003.
The U.N. nuclear agency reported the disappearance to the Security Council on Monday.
On Tuesday, Russia, citing the disappearance, called on the U.N. Security Council to discuss the return of U.N. weapons inspectors to Iraq. But the United States said American inspectors were investigating the loss and there was no need for U.N. experts to return.
The Al-Qaqaa explosives included HMX and RDX, key components in plastic explosives. HMX is also a substance powerful enough to ignite the fissile material in an atomic bomb and set off a nuclear chain reaction.
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said Monday that coalition forces were present in the vicinity both during and after major combat operations, which ended on May 1, 2003. He said they searched the facility but found none of the explosives in question.
It was unclear whether the search to which Whitman was referring was conducted by a military unit other than the 101st Airborne Division’s 2nd Brigade.
Lt. Gen. William Boykin, the Pentagon’s deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, said that on May 27, 2003, a U.S. military team specifically looking for weapons went to the site but did not find anything with IAEA stickers on it.
The Pentagon would not say whether it had informed the IAEA that the conventional explosives were not where they were supposed to be.
The explosives had been housed in storage bunkers at the facility. U.N. nuclear inspectors placed fresh seals over the bunker doors in January 2003. The inspectors visited Al-Qaqaa for the last time on March 15, 2003, and reported that the seals had not been broken – therefore, the weapons were still there at the time.
The team pulled out of the country in advance of the invasion later that month.
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