US soldiers describe the looting of Al Qaqaa, which they were powerless to stop:
In the weeks after the fall of Baghdad, Iraqi looters loaded powerful explosives into pickup trucks and drove the material away from the Al Qaqaa ammunition site, according to a group of U.S. Army reservists and National Guardsmen who said they witnessed the looting.
The soldiers said about a dozen U.S. troops guarding the sprawling facility could not prevent the theft because they were outnumbered by looters. Soldiers with one unit — the 317th Support Center based in Wiesbaden, Germany — said they sent a message to commanders in Baghdad requesting help to secure the site but received no reply.
[…]
The soldiers, who belong to two different units, described how Iraqis plundered explosives from unsecured bunkers before driving off in Toyota trucks.The U.S. troops said there was little they could do to prevent looting of the ammunition site, 30 miles south of Baghdad.
“We were running from one side of the compound to the other side, trying to kick people out,” said one senior noncommissioned officer who was at the site in late April 2003.
“On our last day there, there were at least 100 vehicles waiting at the site for us to leave” so looters could come in and take munitions.
“It was complete chaos. It was looting like L.A. during the Rodney King riots,” another officer said.
He and other soldiers who spoke to The Times asked not to be named, saying they feared retaliation from the Pentagon.
Further evidence that Al Qaqaa remained unguarded, as if any more were needed, is gathered here by BruceR of Flit:
Nouvel Observateur article confirms Al QaQaa unguarded in November
Well, I’ve read Sara Daniel’s original piece for the French magazine La Nouvel Observateur, which ran in November, 2003. I’ve translated it here. It repeats her claim in the magazine this week that she spent time with a guerrilla group, the one responsible among other attacks for the SAM attack on the DHL Airbus last November, and that it was still using the Al QaQaa munitions dump to supply itself with TNT that month, seven months after the fall of Baghdad, and that the depot was effectively unguarded when she drove on to it and wandered around in broad daylight along with the guerrillas. Daniel’s website has a photo from the dump apparently taken Nov. 6, 2003.
The rest of the interview with “Abou Abdallah,” the guerrilla leader, is interesting in its own right, specifically on how the guerrillas were organizing themselves a year ago (at the doors of mosques), and how he and others specifically disavowed either loyalty to Saddam (then still at large), suicide bombing, or foreign Muslim influences. It’s well-read in company with the contemporaneous Paris-Match interview, apparently with a leader of this same group of insurgents (“Abou Abdallah” again?). One thing you can say for sure… a year ago, the French periodical industry seems to have had a much better human intelligence penetration into the Iraqi resistance than the Americans did.