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US troops not told to secure explosives

A view of the al-Qaqaa military facility south of Baghdad on Sunday. According to the Iraq interim government, nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives are missing from this site, one of Iraq's most sensitive former military installations. A spokesman for one of the first US military units to reach the site during the invasion last year said yesterday that they did not have orders to search for the explosives. PHOTO: NY TIMES

One of the first US 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 last year there were already looters throughout the facility, Lieutenant Colonel Fred Wellman, deputy public affairs officer for the unit, said.

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 type munitions, as they [high-explosive weapons] were everywhere in Iraq," he wrote.

The 101st Airborne was apparently at least the second military unit to arrive at al-Qaqaa after the US-led invasion began. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told The Washington Post that the 3rd Infantry Division reached the site around April 3, fought with Iraq forces and occupied the site. They left after two days, headed to Baghdad, he told the newspaper for yesterday's editions.

Associated Press Correspondent Chris Tomlinson, who was embedded with the 3rd Infantry but didn't go to al-Qaqaa, described the search of Iraqi military facilities south of Baghdad as brief, cursory missions to seek out hostile troops, not to inventory or secure weapons stockpiles. One task force, he said, searched four Iraqi military bases in a single day, meeting no resistance and finding only abandoned buildings, some containing weapons and ammunition.

The enormous size of the bases, the rapid pace of the advance on Baghdad and the limited number of troops involved, made it impossible for US commanders to allocate any soldiers to guard any of the facilities after making a check, Tomlinson said.

Pentagon officials could not be reached for comment yesterday. A spokesman for the 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Stewart, Georgia, said the unit was checking on whether any of its troops was at al-Qaqaa.

The disappearance of the explosives was first reported in Monday's New York Times and has subsequently become a heated issue in the US presidential campaign, with Vice President Dick Cheney questioning on Tuesday whether the explosives were still at the facility when US troops arrived. The Kerry campaign called the disappearance the latest in a "tragic series of blunders" by the Bush administration.

Two weeks ago, Iraq's Ministry of Science and Technology told the International Atomic Energy Agency that the explosives had vanished from the former military installation as a result of "theft and looting ... due to lack of security." The ministry's letter said the explosives were stolen sometime after coalition forces took control of Baghdad on April 9 last year.

The disappearance, which the UN nuclear agency reported to the Security Council on Monday, has raised questions about why the US didn't do more to secure the facility and failed to allow full international inspections to resume after the invasion in March of last year.

On Tuesday, Russia, citing the disappearance, called on the UN Security Council to discuss the return of UN weapons inspectors to Iraq. But the US said American inspectors were investigating the loss and that there was no need for UN experts to return.

The al-Qaqaa explosives included HMX and RDX, key components in plastic explosives, which insurgents in Iraq have used in repeated bomb attacks on US-led multinational forces and Iraqi police and national guardsmen. But HMX is also a "dual use" substance powerful enough to ignite the fissile material in an atomic bomb and set off a nuclear chain reaction.

The 3rd Infantry left al-Qaqaa and moved on to become the first US unit into Baghdad. The day after Baghdad fell, the 101st Airborne arrived at al-Qaqaa and remained there for 24 hours, later joining the 3rd Infantry in the capital.

"We still had Iraqi troops in Baghdad we were trying to combat," said Wellman. "Our mission was securing Baghdad at that point."
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