NEAR BAGHDAD, 7 April 2003 — A team of 10 US Marine Corps deminers operating in southern and central Iraq have found enough arms and explosives in two weeks to support a small-scale civil war.
Yesterday an explosives ordnance disposal unit (EOD) came upon five bunkers, each containing 40,000 anti-aircraft rounds along with five five-ton trucks loaded with surface-to-air missiles, according to one military source.
Previously, in four separate raids the unit found 658 Rocket-Propelled Grenade (RPG) launchers, 950 mortars, 414 grenades, 17 machine guns with 584,253 rounds, 103 AK47s with 1,229 rounds, and 2,750 anti-aircraft rounds.
“We could start a small city revolution with what we’ve got,” said Staff Sgt. Arthur Santoianni. But he added that while the Iraqis were well armed, it had become obvious that many did not have the will to follow their commanders and had abandoned their weapons.
The arms were made in Russia, Egypt, China, the former Yugoslavia, Belgium and Italy. The caches included German gas masks, Turkish supplies of the nerve gas antidote atropine, drums of French solvents and Vietnamese food stocks.
One warehouse raided by the unit contained both food and arms.
“There’s also a suspect plan where nuclear, biological and chemical protectors were found, including atropine kits, and there is a massive bunker complex and God only knows what’s down there,” said one military source.
Some of the RPGs were Iraqi-made at a factory in the southern city of Nassiriyah where pitched battles erupted between US and Iraqi troops in the first week of the war.
“But all of this was found over just a few days and we haven’t even started to have a real look,” said Gunnery Sgt. William W. Moore Jr., who heads the team of eight Marines and two sailors attached to Combat Services Support Company 111.
Moore said most of the weapons were replicas of Russian arms and had been shipped through Jordan or Turkey. All of the munitions had since been destroyed in six massive controlled explosions.
“There’s a lot of boxes marked ‘Jordan’ — in fact the vast majority,” said Moore. “We’ve got a lot of unscrupulous people who will sell weapons to anybody and, when they do it, they don’t look at the ramifications of what they’re doing.”
The fact that a team of 10 could discover so much so quickly and with so little effort is an indication of the scale of the disarmament task that lies ahead following the end of hostilities.
“The Italians are into the land mines in a big way, in fact they’re the best at doing land mines,” said Sgt. Daniel J. Foster shortly before detonating a cache of Italian-made anti-tank devices.
Moore said the standard and condition of the weapons finds had improved greatly the nearer his platoon had come to Baghdad.
Guns and ammunition found in the deep south had been old and filthy but the caches discovered close to the capital were often new and had been kept in good order.
Some arms were found after local Iraqis came forward with information, others following interrogation of prisoners of war or after an area had been scoured by front-line troops. However, one macabre find had shown that not all tip-offs were as fruitful as others.
“After following a delicate EOD procedure orchestrated like a symphony, it turned out to be a coffin with a dead body in it,” Staff Sgt. Michael Clark said. “A cache was also retrieved from an Iraqi sewer — that was nasty.”
