Dozens of ballistic missiles are missing in Iraq. Vials of dangerous microbes are unaccounted for. Sensitive sites, once under U.N. seal, stand gutted, their arms-making gear hauled off by looters, or by arms-makers.

All the world now knows that Iraq had no threatening weapons of mass destruction programs. But two years after U.S. teams began their futile hunt, Iraq has something else: a landscape of ruined military plants, unanswered questions and loose ends — some potentially lethal, a review of official reporting shows.

Chief U.N. arms inspector Demetrius Perricos said outsiders are seeing only a "sliver" of the mess inside Iraq.

Satellite images, he said, indicate at least 90 sites in the old Iraqi military-industrial complex have been pillaged.

U.S. teams paint a similar picture: "There is nothing but a concrete slab at locations where once stood plants or laboratories," the Iraq Survey Group said in its final report. The report from inside Iraq, 986 pages thick, is often thin on relevant hard information and silent in critically important areas.

Just days after it was issued last fall, for example, news leaked that tonnes of high-grade explosives had been looted a year earlier from the Iraqi complex at Al Qaqaa. It was a potential boon to Iraq's car bombers, but the U.S. document did not report this dangerous loss.

Similarly, the main body of the U.S. report discusses Iraq's Samoud 2s, but doesn't note that many of these ballistic missiles haven't been found. Only via an annex table does the report disclose that as many as 36 Samouds may be unaccounted for in the aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion.

Seventy-five of the liquid-fuelled missiles were destroyed under U.N. oversight before the war, because they too often exceeded the 150-kilometre range allowed for Iraqi missiles under the 12-year-old U.N. inspection regime.

After the U.N. inspectors were evacuated on the eve of the U.S. invasion, they lost track of the remaining missiles.

The Iraq Survey Group, which ended its arms hunt in December, says a complete accounting of the Samouds "may not be possible due to various factors."

Besides the Samouds, up to 34 Fatah missiles — a similar but solid-fuelled weapon — are also unaccounted for. And more than 600 missile engines may be missing; the U.S. document simply doesn't report their status.

Perricos, in an interview at his New York headquarters, expressed concern about the missiles.

"If they have been destroyed, somebody should know they've been destroyed or not. Have they gone somewhere?" he asked.

The worry is not that Iraqi insurgents might field the missiles, he said, but that advanced Samoud or Fatah parts might secretly boost missile-building programs elsewhere in the region or beyond.

"The engines can easily be sold for a lot of money for the insurgency," he said.

Asked about gaps in Iraq Survey Group reporting — specifically the silence on the Al Qaqaa explosives — a CIA official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, replied: "Our focus and goal was to find WMD, not conventional explosives."

Led by CIA special adviser Charles Duelfer, the Iraq Survey Group discredited Bush administration claims of an Iraqi WMD threat by determining that Baghdad's programs to build nuclear, chemical and biological weapons were shut down in 1991 under U.N. inspection.

But Samouds and Fatahs are only the biggest items on the "unaccounted-for" list. The smallest are bits of bacterial growth for biological weapons.

The Iraqis said this bioweapons material was destroyed years ago, but not all is documented. Inspectors simply don't know whether vials of seed stock — including deadly anthrax and botulinum A bacteria — may have been used to nurture more batches that are unaccounted for.

The U.S. arms hunters' findings further cloud the picture on another item with a dead-end paperwork trail: 155-millimetre mustard-gas shells.

At least 13,000 shells filled with mustard were destroyed under U.N. supervision in the 1990s, but 550 were never found although Iraqis told U.N. inspectors they were destroyed in a fire.

Now the U.S. teams say an imprisoned Iraqi official told them a Special Republican Guard unit retained the chemical rounds, and Iraq was about to declare them to U.N. inspectors when the Americans invaded.

© 2005 The Associated Press

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