October 13,
2008: U.S. troops in Iraq recently
discovered an exceptionally large weapons cache. The main items were 269 122mm
rockets (BM-21s weighing 150 pounds each, with a warhead), 200,000 14.5mm
machine-gun rounds and bomb making equipment. Tips from local civilians led the
troops to the cache. There are still hundreds of such cashes hidden throughout
the country, in the hope that the weapons, stolen from government armories in
2003, will be worth something someday. Many of these weapons were sold to Sunni
and Shia terrorists in the last five years, although some of the sellers later
regretted it. That's because the explosives in these caches were used to make
terrorist bombs that killed over 20,000 civilians. Those kinds of attacks
quickly became very unpopular. So did anyone supporting the terrorists. It
suddenly became unpopular to have some
of Saddams munitions stashed away for a rainy day. Then it became downright
dangerous, as the supply of munitions dried up, the remaining ones became much
sought after by the terrorists. In the last two years, cash-strapped terrorists
have gone after families suspected of having a weapons cache, and used
kidnapping and other forms of coercion to get the munitions for free. This led
to members of the family frequently calling in the tip that got rid of what had
become a curse.
