The Pentagon said Monday it cannot determine whether 380 tons of high explosives disappeared from an Iraqi weapons facility before or after US troops arrived there. Iraq had reported the loss to the International Atomic Energy Agency earlier that month.
The missing material, HMX and RDX, had been under IAEA monitoring before the war because both compounds can serve as triggers for nuclear devices. The cache was stored at Al-Qaqaa, a large facility that US forces visited multiple times while searching for weapons of mass destruction.
Soldiers searched 32 bunkers and 87 other structures at the site and found some explosive material, none of it bearing IAEA seals. Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita suggested the Saddam Hussein government may well have been the last party with custody of the stockpile, since the site remained under the regime's control until sometime in April 2003.
DiRita also pointed to the broader scale of Iraq's postwar arms problem. More than 500 weapons sites were catalogued after the regime fell, and US forces have since destroyed roughly 200,000 tons of ammunition. He cautioned against firm conclusions, saying the timeline of what happened at Al-Qaqaa remained too uncertain to resolve.
Historical summary. TurkishPress restated this AFP wire report, first published in October 2004, in its own words.