In June 2002, Sami Ibrahim’s postgraduate student Mohammed Abbar submitted his MSc thesis, A Study of the Quality of the Solution in the Aluminium Anodizing Process. As the Professor had predicted, Abbar’s conclusions were clear-cut. Iraq’s aluminium tubes needed to be protected with a chromate anodize. Above all, they had to be stored separately: without some form of insulation, one infected tube would contaminate all the others.
Professor Ibrahim had been right. Corrosion was like a disease. Not only was it almost impossible to eliminate, it was also horribly, horribly contagious.
5
Stuff Happens
Freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to commit mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They’re also free to live their lives and do wonderful things. And that’s what’s going to happen here.
Donald Rumsfeld, April 2003
I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators.
Dick Cheney, March 2003
Haki Mohammed and his brothers were shovelling manure on their farm in Yusifiyah when the soldier arrived. Dishevelled and clearly distressed, the man had run a great distance. He slumped against a fence to catch his breath.
‘Please,’ he entreated, ‘are you true Arabs?’
The Iraqis, raised in a culture of obligatory hospitality towards needy strangers, immediately understood the question’s subtext. The man needed help. Even had he not been a soldier (Haki thought he recognized the uniform of a Special Republican Guard), they were honour-bound to offer assistance.
‘Of course,’ Haki assured the man. ‘What is it you need?’
The soldier held out his AK-47. ‘Take it.’ He indicated the webbing around his waist, stuffed full of charged magazines. ‘Take them all. I don’t want them. But I need a dishdash or a robe. Anything that isn’t a uniform.’
Then, without any warning, the soldier started to undress.
The Mohammeds were indeed good Arabs. They fetched a dishdash and the man slipped it on. True to his part of the bargain, he handed over his rifle in exchange.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘It’s yours.’
The Iraqis raised their hands, indicating that they didn’t expect payment for the robe. For a moment the soldier appeared perplexed. Then, without warning, he flung the ammunition and the rifle down on the ground and ran off into the desert.
Bemused, the Yusifiyans examined the fleeing soldier’s belongings. He had not been a Republican Guard at all. His uniform, bereft of rank badges, was that of a rarer outfit: Manzaumat al Amin, the Iraqi military’s security and protection agency.
A small, nondescript town of a few thousand souls twenty-five kilometres south-west of Baghdad, Yusifiyah is known for its rich soil, which facilitates the production of potatoes famous throughout Iraq for their size and flavour. The singer Farouk Al-Khatib was born here. But that’s about it. For those uninterested in either potatoes or Iraqi popular music, there’s little of interest: farms criss-crossed by irrigation ditches, a great deal of sand, and not much else.
Nahir Yusifiyah, the crescent-shaped region surrounding the town, is scarcely more exciting. Sparsely populated, the area is mostly given over to piecemeal agriculture: chillies, oranges and small-scale fish farming. Bounded to the west by the Euphrates river, it encompasses the towns of Latifiyah, Mahmudiyah and Iskandariyah – each about as notable as Yusifiyah. Essentially, Nahir Yusifiyah is one of those in-between places: those driving south from Baghdad to Najaf on Highway 8 pass through it; those heading west to Fallujah on Highway 10, above it. Then they move on. Few stop to take a second look.
Yusifiyah’s obscurity, however, together with its convenient location – less than thirty minutes’ drive from Baghdad Airport – make it perfect for certain purposes: hiding things, for example. Things you’d rather no one ever knew about. Secret things.
Sure enough, fifteen kilometres to the south lies a big, big secret.
The secret dates back to 1977, when the then President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr ordered the construction of a vast munitions plant outside town. Built by the Yugoslavs, the factory was originally to be named after Bakr himself, until Saddam Hussein seized power in 1979. In a fit of patriotic zeal, the fledgling dictator named it after the Iraqi general Qa’qaa ibn Umar, who in the seventh century inflicted a most glorious massacre on the Persian army in the second battle of Qasidiya: Al Qa’qaa.
Weapons inspectors who visited the facility were dumbstruck by the scale of the place.
‘Huge,’ comments one senior figure familiar with the site. ‘The biggest chemical plant I’ve ever seen.’
Covering an area of 36 square kilometres, containing 1,100 buildings and employing more than 14,000 staff, the site was essentially a secret, self-sufficient city, ten times the size of New York’s Central Park – in the middle of the desert. It even had its own power station.
‘Just enormous,’ agrees another inspector. ‘The largest explosives plant in the Middle East.’
For more than twenty years, Al Qa’qaa formed the heart of the country’s rocketry programme, producing the propellants, igniters and explosives that made Iraq’s munitions (including the now infamous Nasser 81 artillery rockets) go up, then ensured they detonated when they came down.
Saddam was so pleased with the facility that, when the Iran-Iraq War broke out in 1980, he built a number of other weapons factories nearby. Soon, Nahir Yusifiyah was teeming with armaments facilities. To the south, Mahaweel, a vast explosives-storage site bordered by Um Nassr, a manufacturing facility for free-fall aircraft bombs; to the south-east, Hatteen, an ammunition filling plant with its own artillery range. To the north stood Al Qadissiya, a small-arms manufacturing facility. Adjacent to it was Al Furat, built to make small arms, but which shortly moved into nuclear centrifuge development. To the east, there were more: Badr (machine tooling for centrifuges), Nida (scud-missile manufacture), Al Amin (gun barrels) and Hakim (bio-warfare). All huge, clandestine weapons sites with their own research staff and agendas.
From the outside there was little to indicate what was going on in Al Qa’qaa. Surrounded by tall earthen walls, all that was visible was a series of chimney stacks producing oxides of nitrogen and huge plumes of acrid brown smoke. Employees in the facility were not allowed to speak about it; nobody else was allowed in. To Yusifiyans, however, it was obvious the plant made military equipment of some sort: repeated explosions emanated from within the walls when things went wrong, and from the facility’s test ranges when things went right. Other than that, nothing.
At the heart of this big, big secret lay further secrets, some so huge they bordered on the preposterous. In the late 1980s, the facility was involved in the construction of the largest rifle in the history of the world: a monstrous weapon with a 150-metre barrel and the ability to shoot a 600-kilogram projectile directly into space. The Supergun required ten tons of propellant for each shot – doubtless the reason why research was underway at Qa’qaa, where the explosive material was to be made.
Unfortunately, even this state-of-the-art facility was not up to the task. At the end of the decade, suppliers were sought for a pair of compounds that the facility was unable to synthesize purely: RDX (the basis for a number of explosives, including C4) and PETN (used in small-calibre ammunition and Semtex). The materials, ordered from Eastern Europe via Chile, arrived in shipments of hundreds of tons.
Then the project stalled. In 1991, following the Iraqi rout in Kuwait, inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) gained access to Al Qa’qaa, where they found 145 tonnes of pure RDX and PETN. On a whim, one enterprising inspector asked technicians whether they had imported any other explosives of note. Qa’qaa staff exchanged glances and shuffled their feet, before leading him to a series of bunkers containing hundreds of drums of an off-white, crystalline powder. About as highly explosive as high explosive gets, High Melt Explosive (HMX) is used to detonate nuclear warheads. Qa’qaa had nearly 200 tonnes of it. The IAEA moved all the explosives to secure bunkers on t
he south-west corner of the facility, then closed the doors with tamper-proof seals. And there the 341 tonnes sat for more than a decade.
Of course, inhabitants of Yusifiyah and the surrounding towns had no idea about any of this. In Saddam’s time, there were many things one didn’t enquire about. But that was before the curious incident of the soldier, the rifle and the dishdash.
For Haki and his brothers, Operation Iraqi Freedom had started in the early hours of 3 April 2003, when they were woken by the sound of low-flying aircraft. Moments later, the first American artillery shells zipped overhead. With pinpoint accuracy the shells eliminated Republican Guard checkpoints and roadblocks around Yusifiyah, effectively neutralizing all threat of resistance.
By sunrise, American tanks were trundling north up Highway 8 towards Baghdad Airport. There was a brief pause outside town as units of the 3-15th Infantry Battalion fought a skirmish at Al Qa’qaa. Yusifiyans held their breath.
‘We thought it might be kind of an equal battle between the two armies,’ Haki recalls. ‘We thought we would win the war.’
If the Iraqis really believed this, they were disappointed. The Iraqi army was never going to be a match for the overwhelming firepower of the United States. Almost immediately, news arrived that American troops were on the outskirts of Baghdad. Two days later, the 3-15th departed to join the Thunder Runs into the capital.
Ali, one of Al Qa’qaa’s senior administrators, recalls the invasion well. ‘The Americans came in on the 2nd or 3rd of April,’ he says. ‘There was no fighting. We heard some shooting, but after that it was all over. Most of the soldiers and officers just took off their uniforms and ran away,’ One of them had showed up on Haki Mohammed’s doorstep.
Having ascertained from his uniform that the fleeing soldier was not a Republican Guard but a member of Manzaumat al Amin, it took Haki next to no time to deduce that he had come from the secure compound at Al Qa’qaa, and an even shorter time to figure that, if the soldiers had left, the site was unguarded. For a quarter of a century, the facility had been off-limits. Here, finally, was an opportunity to find out what had been going on in there.
Haki’s neighbours, many of whom had had similar experiences with fleeing Manzaumat guards, had the same idea. ‘Lots of people went in,’ he recalls. ‘They destroyed the fence, and they went in that way . . . There was no army, no guards, nothing.’ The period between the guards fleeing and the first Yusifiyans breaching the compound was remarkably short. About an hour,’ he says.
By the afternoon of 3 April, the largest explosives plant in the Middle East was open to all comers.
A week after the first Yusifiyans breached Al Qa’qaa’s perimeter fence, the US 101st Airborne Division pitched camp just outside the facility. There appear to have been no briefings about the site. The soldiers’ attention was elsewhere: the 101st was itching to get to Baghdad. As far as the troops were concerned, they were sitting on their behinds while higher-ups attempted to jump the queue, to manoeuvre their own divisions into the capital for a share of the glorious victory. They were missing the show.
And what a show it was. On 9 April, the day before the 101st arrived at Qa’qaa, US troops had taken the capital, symbolically pulling down the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square. The image, broadcast around the world, delighted the Commander-in-Chief back in Washington. ‘In the images of falling statues,’ President Bush later announced, ‘we have witnessed the arrival of a new era.’
Unfortunately, by the time the 101st arrived in Baghdad on 11 April, the foundations of the new era were looking distinctly shaky. As the troops settled in to the capital, news began to break that the city was descending into an orgy of lawlessness and looting. Reporters told of mobs roaming the city, stealing everything that wasn’t nailed down. There were so many that Robert Fisk of the Independent witnessed traffic jams of looters in Baghdad. When news emerged that the National Museum of Iraq, unprotected by coalition forces, had been ransacked, the media started asking awkward questions.
Initially, coalition spokesmen appeared unconcerned. The Iraqis were simply demonstrating their hatred of the Baath Party.
‘Imagine the frustration of people after twenty-five years of repression by an evil regime,’ the British Forces spokesman told CNN. ‘They’re only letting off steam.’
Three days later, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld denied that TV footage of looting was representative of the situation on the ground.
‘The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over and over and over. And it’s the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase. And you see it twenty times and you think, “My goodness! Were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the country?”’ After pausing for the laughter to subside, Rumsfeld became more serious. The main thing to focus on, he instructed journalists, was that the country had been liberated, that Iraqis were free. Anything else was a distraction. ‘I picked up a newspaper today and I couldn’t believe it. I read eight headlines that talked about chaos, violence, unrest. And it was just Henny Penny: “The sky is falling!”’ Iraq was going through a period of transition, the Secretary explained. Freedom was sometimes untidy. ‘Stuff happens.’
Rumsfeld was right on one point. Stuff did happen. And not only at the National Museum of Iraq.
By 6 April, Haki was unable to contain his curiosity any longer. Many of his neighbours had been into Al Qa’qaa and had returned with fantastic stories of all the useful bits and pieces lying about. He decided to take a look for himself. Haki and his cousins and friends piled into a grey Kia minibus, hung a white flag from the window to placate passing American troops, and made their way to the main gate. Finding it open, they drove in to the compound.
Clearly, word of the free-for-all had spread. Hundreds of Yusifiyans were roaming around inside. A few were sightseers, but the majority were there for more nefarious purposes. They were gutting the place.
Some targets were easier than others. Trucks vanished fairly quickly. The first few were simply hotwired and driven away. When locals realized there was no rush, however, they became more brazen, using the stolen trucks to return and carry away further loot. Those unfortunate enough to have missed out on the initial automobile bonanza brought in their own vehicles – tractors, trailers, mules and carts – loaded them up and left. The next day they came back for more.
‘Lathes, machine tools, electrical generators,’ says Haki. ‘They were even taking the iron posts from the buildings. They were taking anything they could find. I saw a big truck – forty-ton capacity, perhaps. I couldn’t believe it.’
Al Qa’qaa was assaulted from all sides. From the north-west came the Yusifiyans; from the north-east, the inhabitants of Mahmudiyah. Some of Al Qa’qaa’s senior staff lived in an executive employees’ compound just west of the town. When the power went out after the Americans passed by, they returned to the complex to fetch an electrical generator. By the time they arrived, two days before the Saddam statue ceremony, Mahmudiyans were operating a market inside the walls, selling and bartering plundered goods. Ali, the site administrator, was flabbergasted at the scale of the operation.
‘It was astonishing, the way they managed to steal such big pieces of kit. When the Yugoslavs built the plant, they installed some of the equipment first, then constructed the buildings around it – that was how big some of the machines were. These looters stole them. Some of them were using cranes.’ He shakes his head. ‘They even took the electrical cables. They dug them up from the ground and took them. The water pipes. Everything.’
Directly to the east of Al Qa’qaa, residents of Latifiyah were slower to act, thanks largely to the efforts of local religious leaders, who instructed them that it was haraam – forbidden – to steal from the site.
‘In the mosques the imams were saying, “This is wrong,”’ recalls Ahmed, a chemical engineer who worked at the weapons plant before the invasion. He shrugs. ‘It made no difference. They went in a
nyway’ Initially, the targets were the same: cars, trucks, air conditioners, electrical goods, machine tools. Once these items were gone, the looters took anything that looked like it might be valuable. ‘We had security devices to protect the perimeter fence. There were cameras, and a computer that ran the system. The looters didn’t know what they were. They took them all.’
As yet, however, the looters had not discovered Al Qa’qaa’s real treasure: the vast stockpiles of HMX, PETN and RDX. We know they had not discovered the explosives because of a somewhat fortuitous event. On 18 April, two weeks after the looting began, a pair of American journalists did.
Over the course of the month that they had been embedded with the 101st Airborne, reporter Dean Staley and cameraman Joe Caffrey had seen more than their fair share of action. The 101st had encountered stiff resistance as it fought its way north from Kuwait, and the journalists, representing TV station KSTP-St Paul, Minneapolis, were fortunate to have been allowed to tag along. Now, however, they were stuck. At the end of the second week in April, the 101st had established a base a mile south-east of Al Qa’qaa, from which they serviced Black Hawk helicopters and ferried military bigwigs around. A week later, they were still there. With no obvious route to Baghdad, the journalists’ chances of an exclusive were growing slimmer by the minute. The capital had fallen a week earlier and the war appeared to be winding down. Staley and Caffrey didn’t want to appear ungrateful, but they were bored.
So when, on the morning of 18 April, a sergeant and a warrant officer offered them the opportunity to tag along on a trip outside the camp, they were all ears.
‘It was a sightsee,’ recalls Caffrey. ‘Non-sanctioned. They basically decided on a whim, because they weren’t assigned to fly that day, to check out the base.’
A History of the World Since 9/11 Page 18