ZUWAD KHALAF, Iraq – U.S. soldiers in the northern Iraqi desert dug up more than 1,000 aging rockets and missiles wrapped in plastic, some of which were buried as recently as two weeks ago, Army officials said Tuesday.
Commanders in the 101st Airborne Division said an Iraqi tipped them off to the buried weapons, perhaps an indication that residents in this largely Sunni Arab region about 150 miles north of Baghdad are beginning to warm up to coalition forces.
“The tide is turning,” said 2nd Lt. Patrick Vardaro, 23, of Norwood, Mass., a platoon leader in the division’s 187th Infantry Regiment. “It’s better to work with Americans than against us.”
As the sun set, soldiers from the 101st continued to uncover more, following zigzagging tire tracks across the desert floor and using metal detectors to locate weapons including mines, mortars and machine gun rounds.
“This is the mother load, right here,” Sgt. Jeremy Galusha, 25, of Dallas, Ore., said, leaning on a shovel after finding more than 20 Soviet missiles.
The weapons are of primary concern for soldiers in
Iraq, where bombs made with loose ordinance by insurgents are the preferred method to target coalition forces.
“In our eyes, every one of these rockets represents one less” bomb, Vardaro said.
Vardaro would not comment on whether there were signs the caches had been used recently to make bombs. But service records accompanying the missiles dated to 1984, suggesting they were buried by the Iraqi military under
Saddam Hussein.
Still, the plastic around some of the rockets — of Soviet, German and French origins — appeared to be fresh and had not deteriorated as it had on some of the older munitions.
A U.S. Air Force explosive ordinance team planned to begin destroying them as early as Wednesday morning.
God Bless The Tipster, that stash represented the means for hundreds more GI casualties and thousands of Iraqui collateral damage! As more Iraquis loose family members and friends to the idiocy of radical murderers perhaps more Iraqui citizens will hitch up their belts and be less likely to maintain silence about what they know, or suspect, or what they observed. There are ways to get their info to our Troops without being observed by the radicals. 😉
After all, the sooner the Iraquis can disarm the murderers the sooner the GI’s will go home. Of course, the instigator leaders of the radicals really don’t want the GI’s to go home, because that would create two problems for them: (1) To get to the Americans, they would have to expend even more effort with the non-thinking or simply spineless US politicians who are preoccupied with domestic surveilance as it relates to our CinC’s logical, legal important use of wiretaps and commo interception of suspects, and (2) The rads would have no further excuse to keep killing their own government officials such as judges, police, military, and they (rads) would soon become a *very* hot target of the new Iraqi Government.