US forces venture underground in Iraq

“For the type of regime we are dealing with, the tunnels represent an ideal spot to conceal weapons and serve as a hideout and in some cases an escape route,” said Lt Mark Kitchens, a spokesman for US Central Command.

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is said to have built so many tunnels that just about anything could be underground – troops, weapons or even the Iraqi president himself.

“There were all sorts of tips and rumours, ‘dig under this and you will find that,”’ said Ewen Buchanan, a spokesman for the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission.

He said UN arms inspectors in 1998 found a combination of bunkers and tunnels below some of Saddam’s palaces, but not the sophisticated network that had been speculated about.

“But that does not say that they don’t exist,” he said.

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review said yesterday that US Marines have secured a town south of Baghdad – Al-Tuwaitha – where a nexus of underground labs, warehouses and bomb-proof offices extends beneath a site owned by the Iraqi Atomic Energy Agency.

It said 14 buildings betray high levels of radiation and nuclear residue.

Weapons inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency recently toured the town, “but did they go underground?” the paper quoted David Albright, a former IAEA inspector in Iraq from 1992 to 1997 as saying.

Yesterday, at the airport outside Baghdad, 150 soldiers of the 101st Airborne’s 3rd Battalion, 3rd Brigade searched a 12-room complex inside a cave with white marble floors, 10ft ceilings and fluorescent lighting.

They found cigarette butts, tea bags and other signs of recent abandonment - but no Iraqis.

“We are going to have to try to figure out where they go,” brigade commander Lt Col Lee Fetterman said. “There’s no telling.”

On Monday, US forces captured an Iraqi colonel in one tunnel who was calling in artillery fire from his hideout.

Also at the airport, one reporter described 30 men from 1st Platoon Apache Company entering a tunnel through a “Staff only” doorway below the airport’s baggage claim.

They found a corridor 20ft high and 20ft wide that stretched for hundreds of yards in each direction – but again no Iraqis.

Reports, some stretching back years, allege the existence of tunnels and bunkers built by Serbian, German or Chinese engineering firms, leading from palaces to secret hideaways and more.

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld repeated those claims in December.

“They have got enormous miles and miles and miles of underground tunnelling,” Rumsfeld said. “I don’t know how inspectors on the surface of the Earth can even know what’s going on in the underground facilities.”

Hussein al-Shahristani, a scientist who was imprisoned by Saddam and fled during the 1991 Gulf War, said plans originally called for a subway beneath Baghdad.

Saddam “got all the drawings he told his military, ‘Go ahead and do them but not for a metro, for our weapons of mass destruction. We can hide them, move them around,”’ al-Shahristani said. “We believe now it is more than 60 miles of very complex network, multi-layer tunnels.”

But al-Shahristani never saw the tunnels himself, he said.

Few have, said Patrick Garrett of Globalsecurity.org, a military affairs think tank. “There is tons of conjecture on this subject right now,” he said, but “there’s been no official confirmation or official imagery.”

After encountering the caves used by al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan and the rumours of tunnels in Iraq, the US military took steps to ready their troops.

A site with miles of old mining caves in the Mojave Desert in Southern California was turned into a Tunnel Warfare Centre in 2001, training US troops for the challenges posed underground.