[Media-watch] Massive looting may be under way in Iraq - NYTimes - 28/05/2004

[Julie-ann Davies]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/28/international/middleeast/28SCRA.html

Massive looting operation may be under way in Iraq
Fri May 28, 7:25 AM ET

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Military equipment as well as seemingly brand-new parts
for oil rigs and water plants may be leaving Iraq by truck every day in what
could be a massive looting operation, the New York Times warned.

"This is systematically plundering the country," John Hamre of the Center
for Strategic and International Studies, a non-partisan Washington research
institute, told Friday's edition of the paper.

While coalition authorities have approved the removal of scrap metal from
Iraq, including thousands of damaged Iraqi tanks and military vehicles,
material seen in scrapyards in neighboring Jordan include new material from
Iraq's civil infrastructure.

The newspaper revealed that one hundred semitrailers loaded with what is
billed as scrap metal arrive in Jordan every day from Iraq bearing
legitimate scrap metal, but also inestimable amounts of plundered material.

The New York Times said one of its reporters saw "piles of valuable copper
and aluminum ingots and bars, large stacks of steel rods and water pipe and
giant flanges for oil equipment, all in nearly mint condition, as well as
chopped-up railroad boxcars, huge numbers of shattered Iraqi tanks and even
beer kegs marked with the words 'Iraqi Brewery.'"

The head of the UN International Atomic Energy Agency's verification office
in Iraq, Jacques Baute, told the paper that satellite photographs the agency
uses to monitor hundreds of military-industrial sites for the removal of
sensitive material show "jarring" results.

Entire buildings and complexes of as many as a dozen buildings have vanished
from the photographs, he said.

"We see sites that have totally been cleaned out," Baute added.

"There is a gigantic salvage operation, stripping anything of perceived
value out of the country," said Hamre of the Center for Strategic and
International Studies, which sent a team to Iraq and issued a report on
reconstruction efforts at the request of the Pentagon last July.

"You're going to have to replace all of this stuff," he told the New York
Times.

Sam Whitfield, a spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority, told the
paper that the coalition had put a stop to widespread looting in Iraq.

But a Jordanian engineer at a scrapyard in Sahab, Jordan, pointed to items
that did not look like scrap at all.

He indicated five-meter-long (15-foot-long) bars of carbon steel, water
pipes 30 centimeters (one foot) in diameter stacked in triangular piles
three meters (10 feet) high and large falanges he identified as oil-well
equipment.

"It's still new and worth a lot," Muhammad al-Dajah told the Times. "Why are
they here? They need it there."