A History of the World Since 9/11

by Dominic Streatfeild

  With much of the materiel from Iraq’s largest munitions facilities now safely stashed in potato stores around town, Yusifiyah became a boomtown. The tribes that had accepted the Arab fighters – Karagol, Jenabies, Juangurdan and Rowissat – held all the aces: access to the Arabs meant access to the money. Each potato sack of the explosive formula went for $300 to $500. Abu Sultan, who looted truckloads of munitions from Mahaweel (a subsection of Al Qa’qaa ten kilometres south of the main compound), made a fortune.

  ‘The biggest trade I ever did?’ He sucks air through his teeth. ‘One hundred and fifty artillery shells, a thousand kilos of TNT and some boxes of mortars that contained a thousand each.’ Sultan’s take was $30,000.

  Yusifyah, the small nondescript town of a few thousand souls famous for its potatoes, changed dramatically. ‘People from Yusifiyah had never seen a dollar bill. They certainly hadn’t seen a hundred dollar bill,’ says Haki. ‘But when [the Arabs] arrived, everyone was talking about tens of thousands of dollars. We started seeing people holding bundles of wads of dollars.’

  In this seedy, lottery-win atmosphere, locals rushed to spend their hard currency, throwing lavish weddings, buying cars, trucks and houses. Some used their share of the cash to travel. The sensible ones didn’t return.

  Meanwhile, bored of waiting for the Americans to establish security and tired of living without electricity, sewerage, clean water and other basic facilities, Iraqis turned in their droves to jihadist organizations, then attacked coalition troops. More violence meant less reconstruction, which led to more dissatisfaction, more anti-American sentiment and more violence. The insurgency became self-fuelling.

  Throughout the summer of 2003, the bombing campaign increased. In November, with attacks on coalition forces running at more than a thousand a month, a classified Defense Intelligence Agency report finally stated the obvious: the vast majority of munitions used in the attacks had been pilfered from weapons sites that coalition troops had failed to protect. The next month a joint Department of Defense/Intelligence task force agreed: insurgents had access to ‘virtually all the weapons systems and ordnances previously controlled by the Iraqi military, security and intelligence assets’.

  Although these reports were classified, it was no secret that Iraq’s munitions sites had been – and in many cases were still being – looted.

  ‘We had a map that showed, I think, about fifty-five to sixty square miles – if you put it all together – of artillery, small arms, medium arms – all manner of ammunition, spread all over Iraq,’ recalls Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff. When Wilkerson questioned why this materiel was not being secured, the reply was brief. ‘The answer was “too few troops. We’ll get to it when we can, but we’re not worried about it because right now things look pretty quiet”.’ Wilkerson didn’t believe it for a minute: ‘I had a couple of Marine buddies who were sending me e-mails about it and they were just appalled that they had actually been to this place and had seen what they knew were going to be their enemy hauling out this ammunition.’

  Iraqis were shocked, too. Ali, who had worked at Al Qa’qaa for fourteen years, was beside himself. All these things were there in bunkers, but the Americans didn’t protect them.’

  Haki at one pointed noted that the looting at Al Qa’qaa was being watched by American troops. ‘There was a bridge at the top, Saddam Bridge, and it was blown up. The Americans made a kind of temporary bridge and put their personnel carriers there. From there they could see Al Qa’qaa and what was going on inside.’ To the Iraqi, the American presence was a joke. ‘We didn’t understand it,’ he says. ‘They were letting everyone take the weapons.’

  A number of Iraqis went out of their way to draw attention to the issue. In September 2003, a month after the bombing of the UN building in Baghdad (an attack in which munitions from Al Qa’qaa appear to have been used),10 Ali, the plant’s senior administrator, was invited to the Green Zone to confer with the US military.

  The meeting in the Convention Centre had been called to discuss how best to get Iraqi industries back on their feet. Ali had other plans. After the conference, he pulled the senior US general to one side and explained that he had come from Al Qa’qaa and that it had been severely looted. He then handed the general a dossier containing his senior staff’s assessment of the damage. Such was the extent of the looting, the report stated, it had to be assumed that all explosive materiel inside the facility – not just the RDX, PETN and HMX – had gone. The total quantity was staggering.

  ‘We told him that we had lost 40,000 tonnes,’ Ali recalls. ‘The gunpowder, anything that burned energetically, could be used as an explosive, so you could consider that part of the missing explosives. I said to him, “We have lost 40,000 tonnes.”’ If the general was concerned, he concealed it well, especially when Ali informed him that among the looted munitions were a thousand suicide-bomb belts manufactured at Saddam Hussein’s orders in February 2003. ‘There was no reaction. He took the records and didn’t say anything.’

  The Americans just didn’t seem to care about the looting of Al Qa’qaa. Result was devastating. Wayne White, INR’s senior representative on the interagency team for intelligence collection on Iraq from 2003 to 2005, received briefings twice a week from the Iraq Survey Group, which was hunting weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after the invasion. ‘Virtually every single site report was the same,’ he recalls. ‘“We came to the site and found it thoroughly looted.”’ White couldn’t believe what he was hearing: ‘There was so much of that going on. Practically nothing was guarded. Practically nothing.’

  Lawrence Wilkerson likewise was appalled. ‘It was being dismissed in Baghdad,’ he says. ‘But my Marine friends were saying, “No, no, no, no, no. They’re taking it out intact. They’re going to use it. And they’re going to use it against us.”’

  * * *

  Abu Shujaa sits in an armchair and thinks for a moment.

  ‘One of the operations we did was the attack on the Al Amyria police station. Its name later changed to the Serious Crimes Unit. This was in October 2003. We received information from our intelligence service that one of the high-profile military generals would be there. We decided to use a car bomb.’

  Shujaa has proved a hard man to track down. One of the founders of the Iraqi Islamic Army, he leads a clandestine life – moving, hiding, and moving again. After a month of negotiations in Baghdad, we have found him through intermediaries, and intermediaries of intermediaries. Shortly after our interview, he will flee Iraq for Syria. For the moment, however, clad in a tracksuit, the tall, dark forty-five-year-old is talking.

  ‘We used two cars: Nissan Patrol four-by-fours that had previously belonged to the Iraqi Special Services. We wanted to park them close to the entrance of the police station. We took into account the fact that there were schools nearby.

  ‘We used TNT and the explosives taken from the western bunkers of Al Qa’qaa. They had been removed and hidden in western Baghdad, near Abu Ghraib. In total, we used about twenty-four kilos, which we mixed with the formula [powder from Al Qa’qaa] to make the explosions more effective. The formula was available through the farmers to the west of Al Radhwania and the Al Rashid area [Yusifiyah is in this area]. Most of the explosives had been taken and hidden in flour sacks near the railway tracks.’

  Shujaa’s first car detonated outside the police station at 9.45 a.m. on 27 October 2003. Passer-by Hamid Abbas was killed, along with his daughters Samar (twenty-five) and Doniya (sixteen) and his one-year-old granddaughter.

  ‘The other car didn’t explode,’ continues Abu Shujaa. ‘The explosives were a bit moist. They had been stored in a place that was too humid. Although the amount that had been taken from Al Qa’qaa was very large, we were concerned that we would finish it all if we didn’t use it wisely. So after that we decided to mix a little more TNT with the formula, in case it was too humid.’

  * * *

  International Atomic Energy Agency staff in Vienna w
ere livid. Munitions sites in Iraq had been heavily looted, but the Americans would not allow the IAEA to visit them; the Agency was reliant on second-hand news. When nothing was heard about Al Qa’qaa, inspectors chased up the interim government directly. What had happened to the sealed RDX, PETN and HMX? Was it safe?

  A year later, on 10 October 2004, Jacques Baute, the Agency finally received a one-page letter from the Iraqi Planning and Following-up Directorate.

  THE FOLLOWING MATERIALS, WHICH HAVE BEEN INCLUDED IN ANNEX 3 (ITEM 74) REGISTERED UNDER IAEA CUSTODY WERE LOST AFTER 9-4-2003, THROUGHOUT THE THEFT AND LOOTING OF THE GOVERNMENTAL INSTALLATIONS DUE TO LACK OF SECURITY.

  The letter contained a table detailing the ‘lost’ materiel: 5.8 tonnes of PETN, 141.233 tonnes of RDX and 194.741 tonnes of HMX. At last, the truth: 341 tonnes of high explosive were missing.

  The letter created consternation. What was the Agency supposed to do with it? The American presidential election was three weeks away. If the IAEA went public with the news, it would look like the Agency – supposedly apolitical – was taking a swipe at the Bush administration. If, on the other hand, it sat on its hands, it would be open to charges of sabotaging the campaign of Bush’s opponent, John Kerry. Potentially, the letter was a political trap.

  IAEA director Mohammed ElBaradei attempted a compromise, contacting the UN Security Council. The explosives were gone, he told them. There was every chance the news would leak. Perhaps, however, it was possible to keep a lid on it for a while, giving the coalition a chance to try to find some of them before the news broke?

  The diplomatic approach came to nothing. On 14 October, the Agency received a call from CBS’s 60 Minutes in New York. The programme had managed to obtain a copy of the letter. So had the New York Times. Realizing the cat was out of the bag, the next day the IAEA officially informed the US-led Multinational Force (MNF) that the explosives were missing. News of the report made it almost immediately to Condoleezza Rice and the President. Meanwhile, 60 Minutes and the New York Times contacted the Agency again, to check facts for the stories they hoped to run. David Sanger of the Times hastily drafted an article, while travelling with the President on Air Force One in the last days of the election campaign. No date was set for its publication.

  Then, suddenly, the story leaked. On Thursday, 21 October – thirteen days before the presidential election – Chris Nelson, the author of a respected Washington political online report, received an anonymous phone call. A huge quantity of high explosives had gone missing, he was told. They had been stolen. They were being used to attack US troops. Nelson did some checking, discovered the story stood up and posted it on the Internet that weekend.

  David Sanger, still waiting for the editors of the Times to publish his exclusive, discovered that the story was leaking on Sunday. Over a mobile phone call from a football field in New Mexico, he encouraged them to put his piece out right away. The article went out the next morning: ‘Huge Cache of Explosives Vanished from Site in Iraq’. Shortly after the newspaper hit the streets, Bush’s chief political strategist Karl Rove swept into the media area of Air Force One and started shouting at Sanger.

  ‘Rove came and screamed at me in front of all the other reporters,’ he says. ‘Declared that this had been invented by the Kerry campaign.’ Apparently, the report had hit a nerve.

  It was at this point that the story of the looting of Al Qa’qaa got really dirty.

  With the presidential election just eight days away, it now became crucial for the White House to neutralize the story. If voters suspected that American GIs were dead because of sheer official incompetence, they might be tempted to vote the wrong way. Evangelistic certainty and moral clarity were one thing; US soldiers dying needlessly in the sand in a faraway country was quite another. Had the explosives been stolen? Why had they not been protected? Had there not been enough troops?

  The looting of Al Qa’qaa raised a whole swathe of issues the Bush administration was not keen to address. Not this close to an election, anyway.

  Over the course of the next week, the White House deployed a number of tactics to make the story go away. On board Air Force One, spokesman Scott McClellan immediately informed journalists that the looting at Al Qa’qaa was an Iraqi problem. The issue, he said, had been the responsibility of the Iraqi government since 28 June, when the United States had handed back powers of administration. This was disingenuous: the looting had taken place before the Americans handed power back to the Iraqis. McClellan’s explanation never resurfaced – but it bought valuable time for the White House to cook up some proper denials.

  The first tactic the administration deployed to counter the New York Times story was simply to assert it was untrue. There were different angles of attack. One was that the explosives had not been there in the first place. Various figures were presented to show that the IAEA had got its sums wrong. There weren’t, for instance, 141 tonnes of RDX at Al Qa’qaa. Actually, there had been only 3 tonnes. In conjunction with this argument came a second, more formidable one: that the explosives had been there, but Saddam had moved them prior to the war. The Pentagon brandished satellite photos of heavy trucks at Al Qa’qaa the day before the US invasion began.

  The ‘the explosives weren’t there’ argument appealed to common sense. How could 341 tonnes of explosives simply have vanished when the area was swarming with US troops? Surely someone would have seen something? To bolster its case, the Pentagon wheeled out Colonel David Perkins, commander of the troops that took the area in April 2003. According to Perkins, it was ‘highly improbable’ the material had been stolen after the invasion. ‘The enemy sneaks a convoy of ten-ton trucks in,’ Perkins asked rhetorically, ‘and loads them up in the dark of night and infiltrates them in your convoy and moves out? That’s kind of a stretch too far.’

  Donald Rumsfeld agreed. ‘Picture all of the tractor trailers and fork-lifts and caterpillars it would take,’ the Secretary told Voice of America. ‘We had total control of the air. We would have seen anything like that.’

  To prove the weapons had disappeared prior to the invasion, the Pentagon also cited NBC journalist Lin Lai-Jew, who had accompanied the 101st Airborne into Al Qa’qaa. Neither she, nor the 101st, had seen the munitions: proof positive, government spokesmen argued, that the material had already gone. When CBS pointed out that it was equally possible Lin Lai-Jew and the 101st had not found the sealed explosives because they had never actually looked for them, the administration turned a deft somersault and changed its argument again.

  Even if the explosives had been there at the time of the invasion, it argued, they had probably been destroyed by US troops. Another officer was wheeled out. Austin Pearson of the 24th Ordnance Company had visited the site on 13 April 2003 and removed 250 tons of ordnance, including TNT, detonator cord and white phosphorous rounds. The material had later been destroyed. There were photographs of the operation, Pentagon spokesman Larry di Rita told journalists, ‘which we may provide later’.

  It’s not our responsibility.

  The explosives weren’t there.

  The explosives were moved.

  We destroyed the explosives.

  Excuses were coming thick and fast. At one point Deputy Undersecretary for Defence for International Technology Security John A. Shaw accused the Russians of having removed them. It was an interesting way of looking at the problem: the United States had invaded Iraq on the basis of weapons it had assumed were present there, because post-9/11 it was necessary to assume the worst and to plan for it. Now there was real evidence that weapons had been present, the administration decided it was best to assume they had never been there.

  In addition to rubbishing the factual basis of the story, more subtle, underhand techniques were employed. Right-wing commentators wondered aloud why the issue had surfaced so close to the election. They then provided the answer themselves: it had been leaked by Mohammed ElBaradei. The head of the IAEA had recently been informed he would not serve a second term. In retaliatio
n, they argued, he had decided to ‘cast his vote’.11 Also implicated, apparently, were the New York Times and CBS, which had set out to launch ‘an ambush on the President’.

  The waters were further muddied by repeated public assertions that the story had already been proven false. According to former Republican senator Fred Thompson, ‘the stories have pretty much been discredited’; General Wayne A. Downing, briefly Bush’s counter-terror adviser, announced that the story was ‘bogus’. Fox News took the angle a step further. According to the network, the story was so weak it was now proving ‘an embarrassment to the New York Times’.

  Finally, the administration added a think-point: even if the materiel had been at Al Qa’qaa, even if it had been looted, the loss wasn’t significant. Iraq had been awash with munitions at the end of the war. Some 402,000 tons of armaments had been destroyed. It was estimated that Iraq’s total holdings were in the region of 650,000 tons. Compared with this vast figure, 341 tonnes was a paltry 0.06 per cent.12 The New York Times was making a mountain out of a molehill.

  At the start of the campaign, President Bush’s advisers steered him clear of the Al Qa’qaa issue. But as the election drew closer and the presidential hopeful John Kerry’s accusations piled up, Bush and Vice-President Cheney entered the fray. One by one, the administration’s arguments tumbled out. The charges were ‘outrageous’, Cheney told an audience in Sioux City. The materials had been moved before the war. That same day, he told an audience in Michigan the charge was ‘entirely bogus’. The statistics were ‘inaccurate’: the army had disposed of 250 tons from Al Qa’qaa, ‘which included in that amount some significant portions of the explosives in question’.

  Cheney had held forth on the quantity of explosives before. A day earlier, in Wisconsin, he had assured an audience that ‘three months before our guys even arrived on the scene . . . upwards of 125 tonnes had been removed already. Instead of 141 tonnes of RDX, there were 3’. The charges, he concluded, were ‘phoney’.