Kenneth Brown
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- Feb 3, 2003
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Russian special forces troops removed many of Saddam Hussein's weapons out of Iraq into neighboring Syria in the weeks before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, The Washington Times reports in Thursday's editions.<br /><br />The paper quotes John A. Shaw, the deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, as saying he believes the Russian troops, working with Iraqi intelligence, "almost certainly" removed the high-explosive material that went missing from the Al-Qaqaa facility, south of Baghdad.<br /><br />"The Russians brought in, just before the war got started, a whole series of military units," Shaw said. "Their main job was to shred all evidence of any of the contractual arrangements they had with the Iraqis. The others were transportation units."<br /><br />Shaw, who was in charge of cataloguing the tons of weapons provided Iraq by foreign suppliers, told the Times reliable information he recently received from two European intelligence agencies implicates Moscow.<br /><br />Most of Saddam's most powerful arms were systematically separated from other arms like mortars, bombs and rockets, and sent to Syria and Lebanon, and possibly to Iran, the paper said, quoting Shaw.<br /><br />The defense undersecretary said an investigation into Russia's involvement in dispersing Saddam's 380 tons of explosives was ongoing.<br /><br />Disclosure of the missing explosives Monday from the Al-Qaqaa weapons depot in a New York Times story was used by the Democratic presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry, who accused the Bush administration of failing to secure the material.<br /><br />Shaw said the depot was known to the U.S. and was closely monitored. He said it would not have been possible for the special explosives, RDX and HMX, to have been removed.<br /><br />"
If the stuff disappeared, it had to have gone before we got there."," he told the Washington Times.<br /><br />The paper quoted a second senior defense official as saying the Russian units in charge of dispersing Saddam's weapons "were dispatched beginning in January 2003 and by March had destroyed hundreds of pages of documents on Russian arms supplies to Iraq while dispersing arms to Syria.
