US fails to locate antiaircraft missiles in Iraq: Report

The lack of accounting for the missiles, which officials say there could be hundreds of, is the primary reason the occupation authorities have not yet reopened the Baghdad International Airport to commercial traffic, the New York Times reported yesterday quoting officials.

The terminal has been rebuilt and the runways repaired, and Australian soldiers are running the air traffic control system. But portable missiles were fired at incoming planes several times in recent weeks, one senior official told the Times.

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The missiles missed their targets widely, suggesting that the people who fired them had not been trained well. Most of those incidents have not been reported to the public.

American military officers, the paper said, do not know exactly how many of the missiles are unaccounted for, because they do not have precise estimates of how many Iraq once possessed.

The US is pressing the search for the missiles, offering a reward of $500 for each one. The Pentagon has been surprised how many of the weapons, mostly Russian-designed SA-7's, Iraqis have turned in; another coalition official was quoted as saying.

In all, 317 shoulder-fired missiles have been handed over to the military since May 1, according to unclassified army figures. The military has paid more than $100,000 in rewards, the figures show.

US troops have also found several hundred shoulder-fired missiles, many in weapons dumps the locations of which remain secret, another allied official was quoted as saying.

But the Times said occupation officials remain concerned, because there is a vibrant international black market for the missiles in which a SA-7 can fetch as much as $5,000 far more than the US army is offering.

The missiles are easy to smuggle and Iraq's borders are highly porous at the moment.

American officials have discovered that Hussein's overall conventional military arsenal was much larger than pre-war estimates. The CIA has estimated that the weapons dumps found so far in Iraq hold 600,000 tons of all kinds of ammunition and weapons.

The missiles believed to be available on the world black market include highly sophisticated American-made Stingers, nearly one thousand of which were given by the CIA to the Islamic guerrillas who fought the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980's.