Discarded ordnance being used in attacks

Roger Hess, a mine action expert, bumps along in a bright blue Mamba, an armoured vehicle strong enough to detonate two antitank mines but leaving its passengers unscathed. He then pulls up, jumps out and peers under a slab of bombed concrete. He is looking for artillery shells packed in wooden boxes under the concrete to ascertain that they have not been looted, possibly to make bombs that could be used against Coalition forces in the almost daily attacks here. In a field behind the bombed United Nations headquarters, Hess finds markers put in place by his colleagues of the Swiss Foundation for Mine Action, which is working for the World Food Programme (WFP) in Iraq, pointing the way to the shells. "Probably 95 percent to 98 percent of the improvised explosive devices being made are from munitions lying around, and a lot of these sites are wide open," Hess told IRIN. "Places like this - they can come in and fill up by the truckload." Mortar bombs which were components of the truck bomb used to attack on the United Nations headquarters that killed 23 people, including UN Special Representative Sergio Vieira de Mello, and wounded 86 others, might have come from that same field. A 500-pound air missile also in the bomb might have come from an unsecured arms dump, Hess said. "We found a lot of these [120-mm mortar bombs] in the truck bomb," he added. "It's hard to say how long they were collecting the weaponry for it. But anything they could use in one shape or another has been pilfered." Mine and unexploded ordnance clearance teams and Coalition forces over the last four months had removed probably 30 percent of the bombs and missiles left behind by the Iraqi army, Hess said, noting that it was the remaining 70 percent that had been proving so deadly. "They're trying to get all the munitions secured, but the Coalition is spread pretty thin, and they haven't found all the sites," he added. Members of Iraq's 25-person Governing Council and others have criticised the US-led Coalition forces for neglecting to secure weaponry left behind when they drove the Iraqi forces from the battlefield in April. But US forces have said the Iraqi army was so heavily armed that US troops could not have seized all its weapons. US Army Col Guy Shields said Coalition forces had been working round the clock to dispose of old Iraqi ordnance, but that the task sometimes seemed endless. "He [Saddam Hussein] spent so much money and bought so much munitions that they're everywhere," he said. "We try to get rid of them, but every day we find more and more." The field behind the UN headquarters in Baghdad used to serve as a car racing track for Saddam's late son, Uday. Members of the Iraqi forces were given parcels of land surrounding the circuit to build houses. A couple of blocks away, bunkers hold 120-mm mortar bombs and rifle grenades. A makeshift fence put up by a family living nearby was composed of weapons tubes, some still containing explosive charges, Hess said. Moreover, several large surface-to-air missile systems mounted on trucks still remain set up along main highways, an eerie reminder of plans the Iraqi army had for the invading forces.