Origins: The al Taqqadum air field west of Baghdad in Iraq, a sandy wasteland surrounded by high dunes off the main Baghdad-to-Jordan highway, was the focus of intense search-and-destroy activity after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003; its vast desert spaces were thought to be a likely location for missile launchers or aircraft from which chemical or biological strikes against U.S. troops might be launched.
What military search teams eventually found at al Taqqadum, in July 2003, were remnants of the Iraqi Air Force as pictured above: a reported 30 to 40 planes, including several MiG-25 and Su-25 ground attack jets, buried more than 10 feet beneath tons of soil and covered with camouflage netting. According to the Pentagon, at least one of the MiG-25s was found because searchers spotted its twin tail fins protruding from the sand. Some of the planes had been wrapped in plastic sheeting to protect their electronics and machinery from the sand (and some had had their wings removed), but others were interred with little or no protection from the sand or the elements. The recovery teams had to use large earth-moving equipment to uncover the aircraft.
The discovery at al Taqqadum was not announced to the public until a month later, in a press briefing delivered by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld:
WASHINGTON, Aug. 6, 2003 — American forces have found Russian fighter jets buried in the Iraqi desert, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in an Aug. 5 press briefing.
"We'd heard a great many things had been buried, but we had not known where they were, and we'd been operating in that immediate vicinity for weeks and weeks and weeks . . . 12, 13 weeks, and didn't know they were (there)," Rumsfeld said.
The secretary said he wasn't sure how many such aircraft had been found, but noted, "It wasn't one or two."
He said it's a "classic example" of the challenges the Iraqi Survey Group is facing in finding weapons of mass destruction in the country.
"Something as big as an airplane that's within . . . a stone's throw of where you're functioning, and you don't know it's there because you don't run around digging into everything on a discovery process," Rumsfeld explained. "So until you find somebody who tells you where to look, or until nature clears some sand away and exposes something over time, we're simply not going to know.
"But, as we all know," he added, "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
A U.S. military search team examines a Cold War-era MiG-25R Foxbat B, the fastest combat aircraft today, that lay buried beneath the sands in Iraq. Several MiG-25s and Su-25 ground attack jets have been found buried at al-Taqqadum air field west of Baghdad
