Missing explosives

last updated 8 January 2015

Al Qaqaa, Iraq

The Bush administration said this week that around 400,000 tons of explosives, shells, and bombs had been confiscated or destroyed in Iraq since the U.S. invasion last year. Officials released that figure in response to reports that a much smaller amount of explosives, 380 tons, had been stolen from a storage depot at Al Qaqaa. But critics said that since Saddam Hussein had an estimated 650,000 to 1 million tons of munitions, that left the whereabouts of more than 250,000 tons unknown. The Pentagon said last week that the Al Qaqaa weapons must have been looted before the U.S. invasion in March 2003. But a video from ABC affiliate KSTP, taken on April 18, 2003, nine days after the fall of Hussein, showed U.S. soldiers using bolt cutters to break into Al Qaqaa and finding sealed boxes of explosives.