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Oregonian says he told military about looting of weapons
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Oregonian says he told military about looting of weapons
08:48 AM PDT on Friday, October 29, 2004
Associated Press
Two U.S. aid workers, including one from Oregon, said they reported the looting of an Iraqi weapons depot to U.S. military officials in October, 2003, but were told that there were not enough troops to seal off the facility, The Oregonian reported in its Friday editions.
"We were outraged," said Wes Hare, city manager of La Grande, who was working in Iraq as part of a rebuilding program. A colleague, Jerry Kuhaida, told the newspaper it appeared that the explosives at the Ukhaider Ammunition Storage Area had found their way to insurgents targeting U.S. forces.
AP
American soldiers talk outside Baghdad, Iraq.
"There's no question in my mind that the stuff in Ukhaider was used by terrorists," Kuhaida said from his home in Tennessee.
The men said they informed Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, but were told that the United States lacked the troops to guard the facility, which had more than 60 bunkers packed with munitions.
The issue of whether U.S. forces did enough to keep Iraqi munitions from insurgents has become an issue in the presidential campaign. Reports this week indicated that about 380 tons of highly powerful explosives had disappeared from a weapons depot in Al-Qaqaa after the arrival of U.S. forces.
Al Qaqaa is about 50 miles northeast of the Ukhaider site, which was used to store artillery shells and small-arms ammunition.
A Pentagon official told The Oregonian Thursday that the United States had been forced to leave many ammunition dumps in Iraq unguarded. The official, who declined to be identified, said the U.S. military had identified about 900 sensitive weapons sites in Iraq but had assigned only "a brigade-sized force" to deal with them. A brigade typically has about 3,500 soldiers.
The official said he could not speak to how Sanchez had handled the report about Ukhaider.
The aid workers were in Iraq as employees of the International City/County Management Association. They said they found the depot on Oct. 10, 2003, while on a recreational trip.
The area appeared to be guarded by a half-dozen people in their teens and early 20s who had perhaps one rifle among them, and no vehicle to patrol the complex's hundreds of acres, according to the newspaper's report. Kuhaida said it wasn't clear whether the people were working for the military, the insurgents or someone else.
The guards told Kuhaida and Hare that they regularly heard trucks coming and going at night. The men were shown an intruder's truck that was blown up one night, apparently by an errant explosive.
"The big concern we had was that something had to be done," Kuhaida said. "It was all fresh ammunition and gunpowder."
So Kuhaida pledged to try to contact Sanchez, who was commanding U.S. forces in Iraq at the time. He found Sanchez's e-mail address on the Internet and sent a message saying he wanted to pass along some information.
When one of the general's aides replied, Kuhaida sent a list of munitions found at the depot, along with coordinates of its location. And he urged the military to secure the site.
The aide sent an immediate reply that said "they were taking action," Kuhaida said.
But when Kuhaida met the aide face to face in Baghdad a month later and asked about the depot, the aide told him the military simply didn't have enough troops to guard the site.
"There's no question in my mind that these guys were sincere about it," he said of their desire to keep munitions from falling into the wrong hands. "They just didn't have the resources."
U.S. military and intelligence officials were well-aware of the facility. Declassified documents from the first Persian Gulf War show that it was bombed in 1991, as a suspected storage site for biological weapons.
On Jan. 16, 2003, before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, U.N. inspectors said they found 11 empty chemical warheads at Ukhaider. They said at the time the complex consisted of a series of bunkers built in the late 1990s.
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