- PARIS -- A French journalist
who visited the Qaqaa munitions depot south of Baghdad in November last
year said she witnessed Islamic insurgents looting vast supplies of explosives
more than six months after the demise of Saddam Hussein's regime.
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- The account of Sara Daniel, which will be published Wednesday
in the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, lends further weight to allegations
that American occupying forces in Iraq failed to protect hundreds of tons
of munitions from extremists plotting attacks against their own troops.
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- Much of the controversy has centered around the disappearance
of about 380 tons of the powerful HMX explosive. The material, which had
been monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency before the war
and subsequently sealed in bunkers by its inspectors, was reported missing
by Iraqi officials earlier this month.
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- Daniel, who spent nearly two hours at Qaqaa with a group
that has since become known as the Islamic Army of Iraq, could not confirm
seeing buildings that carried the agency's seal or explosives that were
marked to be of the HMX variety. But her report is one of terrorists having
easy access to a vast weapons inventory.
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- "I was utterly stupefied to see that a place like
that was pretty much unguarded and that insurgents could help themselves
for months on end," Daniel said on Friday. "We were there for
a long time and no one disturbed the group while they were loading their
truck."
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- A man who identified himself as Abu Abdallah and led
the group Daniel was with, told her that his men and numerous other insurgent
groups had rushed to Qaqaa after U.S.-led troops captured Baghdad on April
9 last year. The groups stole truck-loads of material from what used to
be the biggest explosive factory in the Middle East in the expectation
that coalition forces would move quickly to seal it off, Daniel was told.
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- Abu Abdullah and his men showed her the arsenal of rocket
launchers, grenades and explosives hidden near their small farm houses,
she said.
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- But much to the insurgents' surprise, Qaqaa was not sealed
off by U.S. soldiers, leading many groups to stop hoarding and instead
going for regular refills of explosive materials, according to Abu Abdullah.
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- Daniel said she saw how poorly guarded the munitions
complex was. During the drive there last November, she recalled seeing
few patrols and "far away" from the site. The truck was stopped
only once, for about three minutes, Daniel said, by a U.S. soldier in a
tank.
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- Daniel said those who went to Qaqaa to stock up on munitions
appeared ready to use them to attack the occupying forces. On Nov. 22,
a few days after her visit at Qaqaa, Abu Abdallah's group fired a surface-to-air
missile at a DHL cargo-plane. The men gave her a video tape of themselves
launching the attack in which she says she clearly recognized Abu Abdallah.
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- Daniel said she decided to write about her experience
at Qaqaa after the disappearance of the HMX explosive became a key dispute
in the U.S. presidential election campaign.
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- http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/10/29/news/explode.html
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