Arms Equipment Plundered in 2003 Is Surfacing in Iraq
More Signs of The TimesArms Equipment Plundered in 2003 Is Surfacing in IraqBy JAMES GLANZ
Published: April 17, 2005
Christoph Bangert/Polaris, for The New York TimesAn Iraqi Border Patrol officer in Munthriya, at a crossing between Iraq and Iran, with confiscated machinery stolen from Iraqi weapons factories.
The New York Times
Munthriya is a way station for anything moved from Baghdad.
IRKUK, Iraq, April 16 - Equipment plundered from dozens of sites in Saddam Hussein's vast complex for manufacturing weapons is beginning to surface in open markets in Iraq's major cities and at border crossings.
Looters stormed the sites two years ago when Mr. Hussein's government fell, and the fate of much of the equipment has remained a mystery.
But on a recent day near the Iranian border, resting in great chunks on a weedy lot in front of an Iraqi Border Patrol warehouse, were pieces of machine tools, some weighing as much as a car, that investigators say formed the heart of a factory that made artillery shells near Baghdad. Military equipment, including parts for obscure armaments used by Mr. Hussein's army, is also turning up in Baghdad and Mosul in the north, they say.
For more than a year, large quantities of scrap metal from some of the sites have routinely been filling the scrap yards of Iraq and neighboring countries like Jordan. But with this new emergence of a huge panoply of intact factory, machine and vehicle parts, it appears that some looters may have held back the troves they stole two years ago, waiting for prices to rise.
"Spare parts?" said Staff Sgt. William Larock, an American reservist in a division out of Rochester, N.Y., who is stationed near Munthriya and is coordinating repairs of some of Mr. Hussein's old troop carriers to be used for the new Iraqi Army. "A lot of them come from the market in Baghdad."
Sergeant Larock said that some of his repairs to the vehicles, which Mr. Hussein bought from a manufacturer in Brazil, were being delayed because the asking price on the highly specialized wheels - clearly stolen long ago from those same vehicles - was too high. "That's why these things are sitting on blocks," he said with a faint smile.
Interviews with people who identified themselves as arms dealers or members of the resistance in Baghdad, Falluja and other Iraqi cities indicate that a parallel black market operates in the explosives looted from some of the same sites. In fact, sketchy descriptions by members of the Iraqi resistance suggest that the arms market is also a highly developed enterprise with brokers, buyers and looters who have stockpiled their products, including artillery shells, mortar rounds and Kalashnikov rifles. One former Iraqi army officer who said that he had joined the mujahedeen said that in Sadr City, for example, a few trusted brokers would take prospective buyers to weapons caches that ranged in size from a few rounds buried in a garden to whole rooms of ordnance. If the broker and the buyers agreed on a price, the buyers would arrive a day or two later with a vehicle to drive their purchases away. The broker and the stockpilers would have worked out their respective cuts in advance.
Witnesses described looters of varying degrees of sophistication, from local people who stormed the sites in search of precious metals after Mr. Hussein's security forces fled to highly organized operations that arrived with cranes and semitrailer trucks. Some of the most organized groups arrived earliest and drove away with largely intact equipment.
When it comes to buying run-of-the-mill equipment and spare parts that were obviously looted in the past, the American military appears to have adopted some version of a don't-ask, don't-tell policy concerning where the materials originated. The materials, after all, are now being sold openly in street markets. So the Americans appear resigned to buying the equipment back rather than seizing it.
But the pieces of the artillery factory were headed to Iran when they were seized a few months ago by Iraqi border guards. They appeared to have been cut apart just so; the dismemberment allowed the material to meet the official definition of scrap, but did no damage that would prevent the pieces from being reassembled.
"They cut in places that were not important," said Brig. Gen. Nazim Shariff Muhammad, leader of the Iraqi Border Guard in Diyala Province, standing with his right foot perched on part of the machinery. "So they let us think it was going to be used as scrap metal."
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