U.N. ‘Spies’ Helped U.S. to Target Factory, Iraqi Says

Yahia Sayyaf was near tears in the blackness of his obliterated factory complex early Monday. He had helped build it. He had managed it. He had defended it against the suspicions of team after team of U.N. nuclear-weapons inspectors.

But Sunday night, Sayyaf watched helplessly as more than 40 U.S. Tomahawk cruise missiles exploded into the 12 most-strategic buildings in the sprawling compound and blew each one to bits with deadly accuracy. All that was left standing in the complex was its restaurant, a warehouse and a service building.

Sayyaf led foreign journalists on a Monday pre-dawn tour through the rubble left by the U.S. missile raid, which the Western allies said was meant to force Iraq to comply with U.N. authority in the wake of the Persian Gulf War. The United States attacked the complex that Sayyaf operated, insisting the installation was a key center for Iraq’s nuclear weapons program.

“They are spies! They are spies!” Sayyaf, general manager of the factory, said of U.N. inspectors who had visited the plant in recent months. The inspectors tagged five of the plant’s most sophisticated pieces of machinery and, Sayyaf believes, passed the complex’s precise plans to U.S. military strategists who planned Sunday’s attack.

Sayyaf said the raid was unjustified. “We were doing nothing illegal,” he protested, asserting that, since at least last April, his plant’s sophisticated milling and tooling equipment had been turning out spare parts for tractors, trailers, power plants and other essentials for Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s ambitious campaign to rebuild his nation after the disastrous Gulf War.

The equipment at the complex, he added, is now far beyond repair, a severe blow to Hussein’s isolated regime, which has been cut off from world markets by international trade sanctions and is desperately short of spare parts and machines.

Sayyaf conceded in the tour that four of five machines tagged by U.N. inspectors--apparently as “dual-use items” that could be used to manufacture civilian items or nuclear weapons--were manufactured by Matrix-Churchill. That is a British firm embroiled in an enduring controversy over Western governments and corporations that assisted Iraq’s effort to build weapons of mass destruction.

U.N. inspectors said Sunday that the complex--a plant that Iraqis on Monday called Al Nidah but that Western sources referred to as Zaafaraniyah--was definitely a nuclear weapons manufacturing site. It had been inspected, and experts believed that it had been mothballed.

But Sayyaf insisted: “We are very far away from this (nuclear) field. I think the main purpose of this attack was just to destroy the industry of this country. There is no other reason for it.”

After the sun rose Monday and the Iraqi Information Ministry brought another convoy of journalists to visit this complex, however, dozens of soldiers with assault rifles blocked their way. And as heavy construction equipment and mobile cranes were moving in and out of the installation, an officer near the gate explained: “Last night was one thing. Today is another.”

For some Iraqis, Monday was a day of mourning.

Led by a military brass band, a funeral procession marched with two wooden coffins draped with the Iraqi flag. The morning ceremonies were for a young receptionist and a female Iraqi guest at the Rashid Hotel. Thousands of Iraqis lined the procession route, many chanting with fury against President Bush and praising Hussein. The weeping, red-eyed relatives and co-workers shuffled through Baghdad’s main streets largely in silence.

Iraq officially protested Monday that the Rashid, hosting a conference of Islamic groups that had flocked to Baghdad to show support for Iraq, had been deliberately targeted. Those protests grew louder after journalists and Iraqi soldiers uncovered what seemed to be more cruise missile parts in a deep crater beside the hotel.

“There is an Islamic conference going on here, and this is an act of terrorism by the Bush Administration,” said Iraqi Information Minister Hamid Youssef Hammadi as he toured the crater before joining the funeral cortege. “This is not achieving anything, and this is not going to achieve anything. . . . The people in the Bush Administration and the allies have to come to a diplomatic, political solution.”

Elsewhere in Baghdad, it appeared as if there was little civilian concern Monday. Even when air-raid sirens blared and antiaircraft batteries opened up just after sunset, filling the horizon with red-and-white flashes in what appeared to be a false alarm, traffic flowed uninterrupted, shops remained open and most Iraqis watched with only mild interest.

In a capital inured to attack, death and destruction by eight years of brutal war with neighboring Iran and a six-week allied aerial assault so destructive that one Iraqi said it made Sunday night’s raid look “like Christmas lights,” most Iraqis treated Monday as just another day.

Traffic snarled as hundreds of thousands of Baghdad residents returned to work. Markets filled. And not even the Monday afternoon news that the allies again had attacked Iraqi missile sites in the “no-fly zones” seemed to faze people here.

There were, of course, exceptions. On Street No. 909 in Baghdad’s Karrada neighborhood, for example, residents were jittery--with reason. It was there that a reporter found what appeared to be part of a cruise missile, which appeared to have plowed into a residential neighborhood that was badly damaged in Sunday’s cruise attack.

Visible was a piece of a component manufactured by a Jacksonville, Fla., firm that supplies missile parts. The part sighted Monday was embedded in Mohsin Ali Mohammed’s garden, just across the street from a demolished house where the Iraqis said a woman had been killed and her daughter and niece severely injured.

Based on interviews with neighborhood residents, many of whom said they watched more than a dozen missiles fly overhead, it appeared that the area of Street No. 909 was in the flight path between the U.S. ships that launched the missiles from the Persian Gulf and the bombed factory. The cruise that landed here either was defective or was shot down by Iraqi antiaircraft missile batteries that filled the sky with flak throughout Sunday’s raid.

“The Americans say (the cruise) is an intelligent missile, but it is an ugly missile,” said Dr. Mohammed Hosham, an Iraqi army doctor who was cleaning up broken glass and discarding destroyed furniture from his home, two doors down from where a cruise struck.

The anger was greatest at Ali Mohammed’s house, which was pelted with so many flying pieces of metal that every window was broken, all three of his young daughters were injured, his car was smashed and much of what he had earned in a lifetime as a merchant was ruined.

“How can I repair this?” he asked as he waved at the broken glass and bloodstains in the sitting room. Inside, the family aquarium stood intact, but the fish in it were dead.

“I have no money because of these international sanctions. So I will leave it like this as evidence of this crime,” he said.

When asked how he will sleep in the freezing cold of Baghdad’s winter without windows, Ali Mohammed lifted the Arab scarf from his head, held it in the air and shouted: “I am a Bedouin by ancestry! I can live in a tent in the desert, if I must, just to keep my dignity.”