Timeline
The Al Qa'qaa complex was occupied for two days by the United States Army's 3rd Infantry Division following a brief battle on April 3, 2003, shortly before the fall of Baghdad. Although no banned weapons were discovered, atropine and 2-Pam chloride — both antidotes for nerve gas — were reported found there. Thousands of bottles of white powder were also discovered, but were found to be explosives rather than chemical weapons.
On April 10, 2003, troops from the Second Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division arrived at Al Qa'qaa en route to Baghdad. They stopped overnight and moved on the following day. According to the brigade's commander, Colonel Joseph Anderson, at this point the complex showed few signs of looting or damage. Al Qa'qaa was reportedly unoccupied and unguarded until the arrival of the 75th Exploration Task Force (better known as Task Force 75) on May 27. By this time, according to Wathiq al-Dulaimi, a local security chief, and other local Iraqis, the complex had been thoroughly looted with enterprising locals even renting their trucks to looters. Task Force 75 found that the complex had largely been stripped of anything of value. Although they searched 32 bunkers and 87 other buildings, they found no signs of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. The team did not find any of the explosives sealed by the IAEA inspectors two months earlier.
On April 13, a team from the 3rd Infantry Division led by Maj. Austin Pearson arrived at Al-Qaqaa. Pearson said at a Pentagon news conference that his mission was to secure and destroy ammunition and explosives. He estimated that his team, "Task Force Bullet", removed 250 tons of material including TNT, plastic explosives, detonation cords and munitions.
Pearson's story provoked skepticism as it came the morning after new videotape surfaced indicating that the explosives were still at the base after Saddam's fall; the videotape (from April 18, 2003) shows what appeared to be high explosives still in barrels bearing IAEA seals. "The photographs are consistent with what I know of Al-Qaqaa", David A. Kay, who directed the hunt in Iraq for WMD and visited the site, told The New York Times. "The damning thing is the seals. The Iraqis didn't use seals on anything. So I'm absolutely sure that's an IAEA seal."
The situation did not become publicly known for over a year afterwards, but IAEA officials reportedly warned as early as May 2003 that looting at Al Qa'qaa could be "the greatest explosives bonanza in history." Although IAEA inspectors were unable to inspect the site themselves due to the US ban on their presence, they were able to obtain commercial satellite imagery in late 2003 that showed severe damage to the facility. Two of roughly ten bunkers in which high explosives had been stored appeared to have been leveled by blasts. Other bunkers were damaged and some were untouched.
On October 10, 2004, Dr. Mohammed J. Abbas of the Iraqi Ministry of Science and Technology wrote to the IAEA to say that the Qa'qaa stockpile had been lost after April 9, 2003, because of the "theft and looting of the governmental installations due to lack of security." Nearly 340 tonnes of HDX and RDX explosives, an amount equivalent to 40 ten-ton truckloads, was said to be missing.
The news led to an immediate controversy in the 2004 U.S. presidential election. Presidential challenger John Kerry has accused President George W. Bush of presiding over an inexcusable failure to prevent the loss of the explosives, while President Bush has criticized Senator Kerry for "jump to conclusions without knowing the facts."
On October 28, 2004, the DoD released imagery dated March 17, 2003, showing two trucks parked outside one of the 56 bunkers at Al Qa Qaa. However, the bunker nearest where the trucks were parked are not any of the nine bunkers identified by the IAEA as containing the missing explosive stockpiles.
On the same day, the London Financial Times reported that the French and Russians may have been involved in the removal of the explosives from Al Qa'qaa before the war began, quoting Deputy Undersecretary for Defense John A. Shaw, who said "various Russian units on the eve of hostilities to orchestrate the collection of munitions and assure their transport out of Iraq via Syria". He also told the Washington Times "the organized effort was done in advance of the conflict". The Washington Times also reported that defense officials believed the Russians could also explain what happened to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs. The Russian Government has denounced this theory as "nonsense", saying that there were no Russian military in the country at the time. Shaw's theory has attracted little public support from elsewhere in the Administration.
On October 29, 2004, the New York Times reported the existence of a videotape made by a KSTP-TV St. Paul, Minnesota television crew embedded with U.S. 101st Airborne Division troops on April 18, 2003, nine days after Hussein's fall. The television crew accompanying US troops recorded the sealed explosives containers at the site, displaying the ammunition cache of explosives and other weapons supplies. Commentators have pointed out that the complex would have been under intensive surveillance during the war as a suspected centre of WMD production. They point out that an operation involving removing 40 truckloads of materials should have been extremely visible and would probably have been attacked, had it been spotted. Some said that the materials being moved might just as easily have been WMDs being moved to the battlefront. However, there is no indication that any such transport operation was spotted by US forces. The tape displaying the sealed explosives containers, as they were being found by the 101st Airborne Division troops, was re-broadcast by ABC on October 27, and by MSNBC on October 28, 2004. The explosives, classified as "dual use" materials, had been sealed by the IAEA, and reported 18 months earlier.
The Administration subsequently stated that it was a "mystery" when the explosives disappeared and that the President did not want to comment on the matter until the facts were known. The Bush administration asserted that an investigation had begun into how, where, and when the explosives went missing; no such investigation has been reported on since the 2004 election.
In May 2005, Iraqi official Sami al-Araji reported on the Iraqi government's investigation into the theft, indicating that the looters "came in with the cranes and the lorries, and they depleted the whole sites. They knew what they were doing; they knew what they want. This was sophisticated looting." (New York Times, March 13, 2005).
Read more about this topic: Al Qa'qaa High Explosives Controversy