A History of the World Since 9/11

by Dominic Streatfeild

  Staley grabbed his notebook, Caffrey his camera; the soldiers picked up a pair of bolt cutters and the four men piled into a Humvee to see what they could find.

  Within a quarter of an hour, they started finding things. Paved roads. Watchtowers. Perimeter fences. And, within them, munitions of every possible shape and size. There were fat bombs, thin bombs, cartoon-style bombs with big fins and, lying in the hot morning sun, bombs that appeared to be leaking corrosive brown material. Some of them were as big as Volkswagens.

  More interesting than the bombs on the ground were the bunker complexes that soon honed into view. There were eight in all, each containing seven or eight buildings. Some of the bunkers’ steel doors appeared to have been prised open. The soldiers pulled up alongside one and the four men peered in. Approximately the size of a basketball court, the building had a cement floor and was relatively cool. Perhaps once, before the power had cut out, it had been air-conditioned. The interior was dark, other than from the light entering through the open doors. Scattered around the floor were mousetraps. The men ventured inside.

  Squinting, the journalists managed to make out symmetrical shapes on the floor: rows of warhead tips, stacked shoulder-to-shoulder. As their eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, it became clear this was not the full extent of the ordnance inside the bunker. Everywhere the men looked, there was more explosive materiel.

  ‘There was just row after row of crates with detonators or caps and different things inside them,’ says Staley. The reporter turned to his cameraman. ‘Oh my God!’ he said. ‘Look how much of this stuff there is!’

  When the adjacent bunker also turned out to be filled with munitions, the soldiers of the 101st became impressed, too. They had no idea about any of this.

  ‘The 101st Airborne, the people we were with, were absolutely ignorant of Al Qa’qaa,’ says Staley. ‘There was no notion of what [it] was, or what it meant.’

  They were finding out.

  The men moved on to a third bunker. This time the steel doors were chained shut, so they peered through the gap between them. Then one of the soldiers fetched the bolt cutters from the Humvee and snipped through the chain. Inside, their flashlights revealed that, once again, the building was filled with munitions. The soldiers became more excited.

  ‘These guys were like kids in a candy store,’ recalls Staley. ‘They were so curious that we became curious as well. Because they wanted to just see what the next bunker held, so they kept going from bunker to bunker to see what all of these munitions were.’

  Outside the fourth or fifth bunker, the soldiers, and the journalists, stopped. A length of thin steel wire snaked around the lock, the chain and the hinges of the door, secured by a copper disc the size of a coin. Clearly, the wire wasn’t strong enough to keep anyone out. So what was it for? The soldiers wondered aloud whether it wasn’t so thin because it was meant not to be seen, that it was a booby trap. In the end, curiosity prevailed. One of them broke the disc apart and the wire fell away. Nothing happened. They walked in.

  There were no warheads in this bunker. Only crates of what appeared to be chemicals. And some strange-looking drums.

  ‘There were these round cardboard cylinders that were maybe a foot and a half across and maybe three or four feet high,’ says Caffrey ‘Rows and rows of them.’

  Cautiously, the soldiers opened one. Inside was a clear plastic bag containing coarse powder. Caffrey went in for a look.

  ‘It was very flour-like, yellow, bright yellow in colour.’ He laughs. ‘I don’t think anybody stuck their finger in it, we weren’t that keen on it. But it didn’t keep us from opening the top of these cardboard cylinders and opening the plastic bags and peeking.’

  Further bunkers also contained the yellow, flour-like substance. In fact, the more the journalists looked, the more they found. Many of the buildings appeared to be filled with it: in one corner might be thirty crates or boxes, in the other, sixty or seventy barrels. The quantity was staggering.

  One of the soldiers drew his breath. ‘What is this stuff?’ he murmured.

  For a moment the soldiers and the journalists had the same idea. Had they accidentally discovered Saddam’s WMD? No one knew. But just in case, Joe Caffrey filmed it all.

  While Caffrey, Staley and the soldiers were exploring the bunkers outside Yusifiyah, officials at the IAEA were becoming increasingly concerned. Reports of looting had reached Vienna, and if they were even remotely accurate the Iraqi weapons sites they had fought so hard to inspect might be compromised. The results could be catastrophic.

  Prior to the invasion the Agency had told the Americans of the dangers of allowing the security situation to collapse. Two weeks after the start of the war, Jacques Baute, the Head of the Iraq nuclear-inspection teams, visited the US mission to advise, again, that the weapons sites needed protection. He specifically mentioned Al Qa’qaa. Just days before the invasion, he told officials, inspectors had inventoried the facility’s HMX, RDX and PETN stores and ensured that the seals were still intact. This kind of material, the Frenchman suggested, should be kept out of the hands of looters.

  There was no reaction.

  Privately, IAEA officials wondered whether the Americans really understood what they were doing. Al Qa’qaa had made the propellant for the Nasser 81 artillery rocket programme, itself at the heart of the administration’s case for war. Inspectors had been in and out constantly prior to the invasion. There was no way the United States could not have known that. The site was full of explosives. It was wide open. On 3 May, an internal memo at the IAEA warned that, if Al Qa’qaa was not secured, the result could be ‘the greatest explosives bonanza in history’.

  Stuff, it seemed, was still happening. And the sheer scale of it was stunning.

  Across Iraq, the moment the fighting was over – and often before it was over – anything of value that was not guarded was looted. The magnitude of the theft almost defied belief. Fire engines, ambulances, tanks, heavy machinery and artillery pieces were stolen. Electrical masts and power lines were pulled down with cranes, disassembled, smelted and sold for scrap. Entire power plants went missing. So much looted metal was dumped on Middle Eastern markets that aluminium and copper trading prices plummeted.

  Prior to the Iraq invasion, the worst looting most UN staff had witnessed was in Somalia, which had peaked at what they referred to as Phase Four, when locals resorted to stripping the tar from road surfaces for use as fuel. Iraq went to Phase Six. Doors were stolen; roofs were stolen; steel joists and ties were stolen; plumbing pipes and electrical wire were stolen; concrete walls were demolished, the steel rebar inside them smelted down and sold. Everything went. In the weeks following the invasion, western staff drove past buildings that mysteriously shrank, storey by storey, until there was nothing left.

  ‘Buildings just disappeared before our eyes,’ recalls one. It was almost as if the earth was being wiped clean by some biblical storm.

  ‘You’d end up with just granules of concrete on the ground. Just a slightly choppy surface,’ says a senior weapons inspector. ‘You might find the odd bolt – but that’s about it. That’s Phase Six looting.’

  Often what was not stolen was incinerated. Prior to the invasion, the Americans had planned to resurrect twenty of Iraq’s twenty-three government ministries, yet once Baghdad was taken almost all of these facilities were left unprotected. Sixteen were looted, set alight and completely destroyed. Only one remained unscathed: the Ministry of Oil – which was heavily guarded from the outset – sending a strong message to Iraqis about the true motives behind the invasion.

  When staff at the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) arrived in Baghdad in April, not only were there no computers, no chairs, no desks, no employee registers and no telephones left, there were no buildings to put them in anyway. Within a relatively short period, the damage to Iraq’s infrastructure by looting far outstripped that caused by the war itself.

  Ironically, the first major black ey
e of Operation Iraqi Freedom was self-inflicted. Having decided, post-9/11, that it was now necessary at all times to prepare for the worst, the White House went to war hoping for the best. So convinced was the Bush administration of the righteousness of its plan – that the operation was a liberation rather than an invasion – it simply hadn’t bothered to consider what might happen if others didn’t see it that way.

  Armchair generals pontificate endlessly about the reasons for the chaos that ensued. Not enough troops, say some. Not enough police, say others. Or not enough planning. Ultimately, however, the failure to anticipate the civil unrest in Iraq was embedded in the very mindset of the policy to invade in the first place – a mindset of almost evangelical certainty.

  To the neocons, liberating Baghdad in 2003 would be like liberating Paris in 1944. Once the fighting was over, the spark of democracy would kindle. Then, like a benevolent virus, it would spread. America would fix the Middle East the way it had fixed Europe when the fighting finished there.

  ‘Write this down,’ George W. Bush instructed Republican governors at the White House on 2 September 2002. ‘Afghanistan and Iraq will lead that part of the world to democracy. They are going to be the catalyst to change the Middle East and the world.’

  The ferocity of the belief that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction was matched only by the ferocity of the belief that his removal would solve the region’s problems.

  To adherents of the vision, it wasn’t just clear that Americans would be greeted with flags and hugs rather than bombs and bullets – it was obvious. So obvious, in fact, that no Plan B was necessary. The result was an example of groupthink that outstripped even the aluminium tubes.

  ‘[The war] could last, you know, six days, six weeks, six months,’ Rumsfeld told US troops in Aviano, Italy, six weeks before the invasion. ‘I doubt six months.’

  Pentagon estimates that the operation would require 500,000 troops were, he said, ‘old and stale’.

  His deputy Paul Wolfowitz agreed, telling a Congress committee in February 2003: ‘It’s hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself

  That winning a war might prove easier than handling the aftermath may have been hard for Wolfowitz to conceive, but it was obvious to anyone with experience of peacekeeping operations. Breaking countries was always easier than putting them back together. Inside the CIA, where the intelligence behind the invasion had originated, officers became deeply concerned that things might not work out the way their higher-ups envisioned. One clerical officer, taking notes at a meeting between DCI Tenet, the Vice-President, the Secretary of Defense and the National Security Council, recalls Tenet wondering aloud if this was really the way things were going to play out.

  ‘I remember a representative from the National Security Council saying, “When we cross that border into Iraq, they’re going to throw flowers at us,”’ he says. ‘Tenet had his microphone turned off and he said, “Can you believe these lunatics?”’

  Others voiced more dire warnings. The Chief of the Agency’s Bin Laden Unit at the time specifically warned that a US-led invasion of Iraq would be likely to provoke an explosive response from potential militants all across the Muslim world. The result might be a defensive jihad, and a great deal of violence. Warnings were met with vitriol. With the country at war, questioning the White House’s policies was worse than disloyal. It was unpatriotic.

  Outside the CIA, meanwhile, repeated warnings from aid organizations and NGOs – including Amnesty International, the Red Cross, Unicef and the IAEA – that Iraq ran the risk of descending into an orgy of looting and lawlessness were greeted with a shrug by the Bush administration: those guys just didn’t get it. They were the same people that had predicted Afghanistan would turn into a quagmire. The opposite had happened. It had been easy. Iraq was going to be even easier. Didn’t they know the world had changed after 9/11?

  Tony Blair’s Special Envoy to Iraq John Sawers recognized the problem within a few days of his arrival in May 2003.

  ‘No progress is possible until security improves,’ he cabled the Prime Minister. ‘Last week, the Ministry of Planning was re-kitted out ready to resume work; that night it was looted again.’ Sawers’ assessment of US efforts on the ground was blunt. ‘[A]n unbelievable mess. No leadership, no strategy, no coordination, no structure.’

  Coalition troops were not providing the security framework necessary for reconstruction to take place. Iraqi support for the coalition was fading fast. The clock was ticking.

  At the Tuwaitha nuclear plant south of Baghdad, marauders carried away hundreds of drums of radioactive uranium oxide. Iraq’s purported pursuit of uranium at Tuwaitha had been one of the justifications for the invasion, yet, once the initial fighting was over, substantial quantities of it simply went missing.9

  On 16 April, the former US diplomat Peter Galbraith witnessed the looting of Baghdad’s Central Public Health laboratory. Looters carried off crates of vials containing live pathogens, including black fever, cholera, HIV and polio. Once again, research into these materials, at this specific laboratory, had been cited as a reason to invade. Yet a young US Marine Corps officer and his platoon stood by, watching. Apparently it wasn’t their job to intervene.

  ‘Stories are numerous,’ Sawers informed the Prime Minister, ‘of US troops sitting on tanks parked in front of public buildings, while looters go about their business behind them.’

  The situation south of Baghdad was deteriorating, too. Initially, looters at Al Qa’qaa had targeted consumer goods such as fridges and air conditioners. Although munitions had been taken, no one really knew what to do with them. It soon dawned, however, that they might be intrinsically valuable. Weaponry was rapidly emerging as a second currency.

  ‘My cousins came to me,’ recalls Yusuf an emerging leader in the insurgency, ‘and they said, “You need to come with us. There is a complete storage unit we need to take.”’ The cousins, security guards at the facility prior to the invasion, led him inside, where he stole rockets and launchers. ‘We even found some pistols.’

  Of course, if Yusifiyans were excited about the discovery of a handful of pistols, they were still unaware of the true value of other items on offer inside Al Qa’qaa. That changed with the arrival of the foreigners.

  ‘After the invasion, we started seeing these Arabs, these foreign fighters,’ recalls Haki, ‘Palestinians, Egyptians, Libyans.’ Most Yusifiyans were wary of these new arrivals, but a number of local tribes took them in: ‘Karagol, Jenabies, Rowissat . . .’

  Yusuf who belongs to one of these tribes, confirms the story. ‘We allowed the Arabs into our houses and our farms. We welcomed them properly. Some of them even married our daughters.’ The fact they were Arab strangers was sufficient to ensure hospitality, but these foreigners had extra pull. They were fedayeen. They were al-Qaeda.

  At first the foreigners were courteous. ‘They told us they had come to rescue us,’ Yusuf says. ‘There were lots of them – some of them tied to foreign intelligence services. They taught us how to use [our looted weapons].’

  They also informed the tribes that some of Al Qa’qaa’s contents were considerably more valuable than pistols. The looting now assumed a far more sinister aspect: the mass appropriation of explosive materiel.

  The moment it was clear that foreign fighters were willing to pay large amounts of money for munitions, the locals went into overdrive to harvest them from the sites around Yusifiyah. At the Hatteen plant outside Iskandariyah, looters descended on the facility in waves like plagues of locusts. Some of them brought bulldozers.

  The first looters to enter Hatteen had been scavengers and two-bit criminals. These new arrivals were more organized. Some showed up with their own technicians, others wore masks; all were armed. Iskandariyans quickly recognized regional Iraqi and even foreign accents among the looters, who were now hunting specifically for munitions. Since the plant had specialized in
the production of artillery and mortar shells, they didn’t have to look far.

  ‘I saw loads of munitions,’ says Abdul, whose house overlooks the facility. ‘We saw the vehicles being loaded. Big, huge lorries, trucks . . . There were convoys of cars leaving Hatteen.’ Looters soon began squabbling among themselves. Some brought their own guards. Gunfights broke out over who had access to which bunker. ‘Many of them were killed.’

  The same thing happened at Al Qa’qaa. ‘There was a rush for everyone to take their share,’ says Yusuf. ‘We took ours. Of course, my cousins came in with me. We even took some Arabs, some mujahedin, with us.’ With former employees of the facility as guides and the Arab fighters educating them as to what was, and was not, valuable, it wasn’t long before Yusuf finally stumbled upon Al Qa’qaa’s real treasure. ‘There were bunkers inside. Sort of underground. We opened them. We found weapons, launchers and hand grenades. We also found different explosives, such as TNT and C4 . . . We took anything. Everything we could get.’

  Yusuf then made a further, intriguing, discovery. ‘We found something that we didn’t recognize. It was like a powder. It was stored in specific conditions, in special barrels.’ Yusuf had no idea what it was. But he thought he might as well take some. Only later would he learn that it was pure, crystalline high explosive.

  Following the rush to appropriate munitions, Yusifiyans had to figure out where to store their loot. Many hid it in their homes. This soon led to tragedy. Rival groups fired rocket-propelled grenades into each other’s houses, knowing they were full of explosives. Accidents also led to fatalities. One of Yusuf’s barns blew up.

  After a few such incidents, the powder was decanted into flour sacks, then dispersed and loaded into subterranean potato stores. Portable air-conditioning units were installed to keep it cool. By 8 May 2003, when the Pentagon’s Exploratory Task Force arrived at Al Qa’qaa to search for weapons of mass destruction, all of the PETN, RDX and HMX was gone. Having failed to find chemical or biological weapons or to locate the IAEA’s sealed explosives, the unit then failed to secure the facility as it left, leaving to further looters the thousands of tons of other munitions that littered the ground.