This historic photo from May 2003 shows a U.S. soldier from the 173rd Airborne Brigade standing beside a large cache of approximately 1,000 crudely cast gold bars intercepted in a truck near Kirkuk, Iraq 🇮🇶
In May 2003, soldiers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade stopped a truck at a checkpoint outside Kirkuk, Iraq, and found 999 crudely cast gold bars stacked in the truck bed, each weighing approximately 22 pounds and estimated to be worth between $80 million and $100 million. The driver’s paperwork did not match the vehicle’s registration, and when the soldiers searched more thoroughly, they discovered the gold was in plain sight, not hidden at all, in the back of the dump truck.
It was not an isolated find. Just two days earlier, soldiers from the same brigade had stopped another truck heading toward the Syrian border carrying more than 1,100 similar gold bars, worth over a quarter of a billion dollars, along a route known for smuggling. The men driving that truck said they had been paid $350 to pick it up in Baghdad and take it to a city near the Syrian border.
With no weapons found, no resistance offered, and the gold left in plain sight rather than concealed, military leaders tended to believe the drivers’ stories instead of treating them as armed smugglers, although the circumstances remained genuinely suspicious given that gold is not a natural resource in Iraq. Pentagon officials said the recovered gold would be kept in secure custody by U.S. forces until a new Iraqi government was established and could decide what to do with it.
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In May 2003, soldiers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade stopped a truck at a checkpoint outside Kirkuk, Iraq, and found 999 crudely cast gold bars stacked in the truck bed, each weighing approximately 22 pounds and estimated to be worth between $80 million and $100 million. The driver’s paperwork did not match the vehicle’s registration, and when the soldiers searched more thoroughly, they discovered the gold was in plain sight, not hidden at all, in the back of the dump truck.
It was not an isolated find. Just two days earlier, soldiers from the same brigade had stopped another truck heading toward the Syrian border carrying more than 1,100 similar gold bars, worth over a quarter of a billion dollars, along a route known for smuggling. The men driving that truck said they had been paid $350 to pick it up in Baghdad and take it to a city near the Syrian border.
With no weapons found, no resistance offered, and the gold left in plain sight rather than concealed, military leaders tended to believe the drivers’ stories instead of treating them as armed smugglers, although the circumstances remained genuinely suspicious given that gold is not a natural resource in Iraq. Pentagon officials said the recovered gold would be kept in secure custody by U.S. forces until a new Iraqi government was established and could decide what to do with it.
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