The Boston Globe April 12, 2003
Holdouts suspected of having banned weapons
By Robert Schlesinger
WASHINGTON -- Coalition special forces are close to securing one of the most obscure yet intriguing sites of remaining concentrated resistance in Iraq, a facility they believe could harbor regime members and banned weapons programs, military leaders said yesterday.
General Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that Iraqi forces near the tiny border town of Qa'im were close to surrender. The western town, near the Syrian border, had been fiercely defended.
''The fighting in al-Qa'im . . . will be drawing to a close here shortly,'' Myers told reporters at the Pentagon. ''There have been intelligence reports that the leaders in al-Qa'im want to surrender, so I think that's going to be worked out.''
The area has been the site of some of the war's heaviest fighting in recent days, according to defense officials. Major General Victor Renuart, director of operations for US Central Command, described the region Thursday as having ''a substantial presence of Iraqi Special Republican Guard paramilitary force and some regular army units.''
Myers added that specially trained teams have inspected sites in the area for evidence of weapons of mass destruction or other banned materials. ''Results pending,'' he said.
The facilities at Qa'im were used in the 1980s to extract uranium yellowcake, uranium oxide, which is used in the regime's nuclear program. In January, when UN weapons inspectors made their first use of helicopters since returning to Iraq, they flew to Qa'im to inspect the facilities. Parts of the complex, near where Iraqis fired Scud missiles during the Gulf War, remain in ruins from coalition bombing in that war.
''Al-Qa'im is an area that we know to be geographically located in such a way that it could potentially be used for the launching of surface-to-surface missiles that would range neighboring countries and threaten them,'' Brigadier General Vincent Brooks, deputy director of operations for US Central Command, told reporters in Qatar. ''We believe also that it may have been involved potentially in the weapons of mass destruction program. The degree of defense there and intensity causes it to be of interest to us, and it obviously is of interest to the regime.''
Coalition special forces teams were sent to western Iraq to deny the use of the giant expanse of desert to Iraqis and prevent missile or other attacks on neighboring countries. Early in this war, special forces captured a far western air base known as H3.Qa'im lies on the shortest direct line of retreat from Baghdad for anyone trying to cross the border into Syria. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said Wednesday that ''senior regime people are moving out of Iraq and into Syria.'' He warned Damascus that accepting the fleeing leaders was ''notably unhelpful.''Qa'im is ''on a very critical crossroad between Iraq and Syria,'' Brooks said. ''And given some of the reports of infiltration attempts or exfiltration attempts by regime leaders . . . that remains a concern to us also.'' Other theories about the level of resistance were more mundane. One senior military official suggested simply that the Iraqi fighters in the remote town had only been receiving the spurious declarations of victory emanating from the regime in Baghdad and may have believed that the war was going well.
Another military specialist, also suggested that the resistance could be from what US leaders have called ''dead-enders,'' those so closely linked to the Saddam Hussein regime that they have no future in a post-Hussein Iraq.
''It would be the center of smuggling activity between Iraq and Syria, and the Fedayeen Saddam special security organization is real big into smuggling of illegal weapons and cigarettes and cognac,'' said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense think tank.
''One might expect that there would be a substantial concentration of them up there who would rather shoot it out with the Americans than get real jobs.''
Copyright © 2003, Globe Newspaper Company
