Al Qa Qaa: the shell game version

Via Flit

Bunker bingo update



The image you're looking at is the southern third of the Al QaQaa bunker complex, oriented to north. You can see the fence around the whole area, and individual bunker buildings.

The bunkers in red are those that were inspected in January 2003 when IAEA inspectors returned, found to be still full of tonnes of HMX stored in cylindrical drums, and resealed. All these explosives are now reportedly gone. The two on the left in a somewhat darker red also had HMX, but it was stored in boxes, not drums, according to the IAEA. There was one more IAEA-sealed bunker farther north in the complex, off the top of this image: in total 194 tonnes of HMX are alleged to be missing from the nine sealed bunkers at Al QaQaa.

The bunker in yellow (bunker #47) is the bunker that in January contained 3 tonnes of RDX explosive in 77 "Yugo drums," and 3.5 tonnes of PETN explosive in boxes, now all apparently missing as well. This bunker was NOT sealed by the IAEA, as they were only interested in tracking the amount of RDX Iraq had at Al QaQaa, not completely denying its use. It is thus conceivable that bunker 47 would have had other sorts of munitions in it as well. (The rest of the missing RDX (125 tonnes) was supposed to have been in another bunker complex altogether, 20 miles away, the IAEA confirmed yesterday.)

The bunkers in green are those where reconnaissance photos released by the DOD yesterday indicate there was some activity in the days just before the war. As you can see, they are not the sealed bunkers, or bunker 47.

The news team accompanying the 101st Airborne said they approached from the southeast of the complex (bottom of the picture), so they were almost certainly in one or more of these bunkers in this photo. (They don't mention going over what would presumably be a chain link fence, so they likely came in through that gate southeast of bunker 47.) Their footage appears to show American soldiers cutting the locks off a non-sealed bunker, which had a large number of containers resembling "Yugo drums" inside, mixed in with some other, non-proscribed munitions. It also showed at least one other bunker nearby with its IAEA seal left intact.

This has been a public service to help you make sense of my and others' previous blathering on this subject. The photo has been lifted from the globalsecurity.org site, cropped and turned so up is north, and the bunker numbers and contents cross-checked with the IAEA January report.