How Much Is That Uzi in the Window?
by EVAN WRIGHT
The New York Times
June 17, 2004
To the American troops in Iraq being subjected to a daily rain of fire from roadside bombs, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades, it often seems that the insurgents have limitless stocks of munitions. In fact, in the time I spent embedded with a platoon there, I heard more than one marine joke that the insurgents must have more bullets to spare than the Americans.
But it's no joke: some military officials told me that the Iraqis have so many weapons that they are suspected of exporting them over the Syrian border. And for this bounty, they can thank the Pentagon. Of all the blunders American military leaders have made in Iraq, one of the least talked about is how they succeeded in arming the insurgents.
By the time of the coalition invasion, Iraq had one of the largest conventional arms stockpiles in the world. According to one American military estimate, this included three million tons of bombs and bullets; millions of AK-47's and other rifles, rocket launchers and mortar tubes; and thousands of more sophisticated arms like ground-to-air missiles. Much of the arsenal was stored in vast warehouse complexes, some of which occupied several square miles. As war approached, Iraqi commanders ordered these mountains of munitions to be dispersed across the country in thousands of small caches.
The marines I was embedded with — a forward reconnaissance unit at the front of the initial invasion — were stunned by the sheer amounts of weaponry they saw as we raced across some 400 miles to Baghdad. Along much of the route, Iraqi forces had dug holes every couple of hundred yards in which they'd piled grenades, mortars and other munitions. Village schools, health clinics and other government buildings had been turned into ammunition dumps. New rifles, sometimes still sealed in plastic bags, littered the roadsides like trash along a blighted American highway.
But under orders to reach Baghdad as quickly as possible, the marines rarely had a chance to remove, destroy or even mark the stockpiles. In one village, combat engineers (led by local children whom they had bribed with bags of Skittles candies) discovered an underground bunker crammed with dozens of sophisticated air-to-ground missiles. Yet higher-ups in the division insisted that there was no time to destroy them. The marines moved on, leaving the missiles unguarded.
The job of removing ordnance was complicated by the fact that many of the combat engineers in the invasion were not adequately trained for the task. Munitions are not easy to destroy. Bullets, bombs and rockets are designed to be shock-resistant. As the combat engineers often discovered, blowing up a stack of ammunition just scattered it, unexploded, in all directions.
Ordnance disposal is best carried out by specialized technicians; the entire First Marine Expeditionary Force (which was responsible for roughly half the invasion) had the services of only about 200. As one of those overworked technicians told me the day we reached Baghdad, it would have taken the experts attached to the First Division a year just to clear the munitions they discovered in the city's eastern suburbs.
And within 24 hours of the fall of the capital, the dangers posed by all those unchecked arms became obvious. The marines I was with occupied a warehouse in the Shiite slum now called Sadr City, which quickly became the center of armed insurgence in Baghdad. The moment it got dark, tracer fire lit up the sky, as gun battles erupted across the city.
The marines were told not to worry; their commanders informed them that the violence was a result of "red on red" engagements, meaning that Iraqis were shooting at other Iraqis. When American patrols entered Shiite neighborhoods starting the next day, locals begged them to get rid of the arms. They told us that semi-automatic rifles, nearly unobtainable during Saddam Hussein's rule, could now be obtained for about the cost of a pack of cigarettes. Heavier weapons were not much more expensive. Unexploded artillery shells (which are now being used to make the improvised roadside bombs) were free for the taking, scattered about backyards and alleys.
Yet several Marine commanders I spoke with at the time felt the nightly firefights were a positive development. "Mostly it's Shiites doing a lot of dirty work, taking out fedayeen and Sunni Baathists," one officer explained. A colonel told me that the armed Shiites were acting through "a sort of agreement with us to take out the bad guys." Some enlisted men even told me that their battalion commander ordered them to distribute thousands of AK-47's to Shiite militia members who pledged to take on America's enemies.
Of course, American commanders long ago abandoned the wildly naïve (or cynical) view that all those arms sloshing around Iraq were somehow falling into friendly hands. But by the time occupation authorities got serious about disarming Iraq, many of the munitions that American forces bypassed in the invasion had fallen into the hands of those bent on killing Americans.
American forces have now destroyed some 300,000 tons of munitions. Yet the troops on the ground still complain that the old regime's supply depots remain woefully underguarded. Nobody knows how long it will take to dispose of known stockpiles — American military estimates range from one year to 10. And then there are the unaccounted stashes, which, based on Iraqi documents, are thought to contain hundreds of surface-to-air missiles, tens of thousands of bombs and half a million pounds of C-4 plastic explosive.
There simply aren't enough technical experts to do the job in Iraq (not to mention Afghanistan). With the handover of sovereignty fast approaching, concern is rising that today's well-armed insurgency will become all-out civil war. American authorities may not be able to eliminate simmering hatreds, but it's still within their power to reduce the numbers of bombs and bullets available to all sides.
Evan Wright is the author of "Generation Kill," about a Marine platoon in combat in Iraq.
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