Many missiles missing in Iraq, review of reports shows

March 27, 2005|Associated Press

NEW YORK -- Dozens of ballistic missiles are missing in Iraq. Vials of dangerous microbes are unaccounted for. Sensitive sites, once under UN seal, stand gutted today, their arms-making gear hauled off by looters, or by arms makers.

The world now knows that Iraq had no threatening WMD programs. But two years after US teams began their futile hunt for weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has something else: a landscape of ruined military plants and of unanswered questions and loose ends, some potentially lethal, a review of official reporting shows.

The chief UN arms inspector, Demetrius Perricos, said that outsiders are seeing only a ''sliver" of the mess inside Iraq. He reports that satellite images indicate at least 90 sites in the old Iraqi military-industrial complex have been pillaged.

The US teams paint a similar picture. ''There is nothing but a concrete slab at locations where once stood plants or laboratories," the Iraq Survey Group said in its final report. But that report from inside Iraq, 986 pages thick, is at times thin on relevant hard information and silent in critically important areas.

Days after the report was issued last fall, for example, news leaked that tons of high-grade explosives had been looted a year earlier from the Iraqi complex at Al-Qaqaa. It was a potential boon to Iraq's car bombers, but the US document did not report this dangerous loss.

Similarly, the main body of the US report discusses Iraq's al-Samoud 2, but it does not note that many of these ballistic missiles have not been found. Only via an annex table does the report disclose that as many as 36 Samouds may be unaccounted for in the aftermath of the US-led invasion.

Seventy-five of the 26-foot-long, liquid-fueled missiles were destroyed under UN oversight before the war, because they too often exceeded the 93-mile range allowed for Iraqi missiles under the 12-year-old UN inspection regime. After the UN inspectors were evacuated on the eve of the US invasion, they lost track of the remaining missiles.

The Iraq Survey Group, which ended its arms hunt in December, says a complete accounting of the Samoud missiles ''may not be possible due to various factors."

Besides the al-Samouds, as many as 34 Fatah missiles, a similar but solid-fueled weapon, are also unaccounted for. More than 600 missile engines may be missing; the US document does not report their status.

Perricos, in an interview at his New York headquarters, expressed concern about the missiles. ''If they have been destroyed, somebody should know they've been destroyed or not. Have they gone somewhere?" he asked.