WASHINGTON, May 28: Military equipment as well as seemingly brand-new parts for oil rigs and water plants may be leaving Iraq by truck every day in what could be a massive looting operation, the New York Times said on Friday.

"This is systematically plundering the country," John Hamre of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonpartisan Washington research institute, told the paper.

While coalition authorities have approved the removal of scrap metal from Iraq, including thousands of damaged Iraqi tanks and military vehicles, material seen in scrap yards in neighbouring Jordan include new material from Iraq's civil infrastructure, the daily said.

One hundred semitrailers loaded with what is billed as scrap metal arrive in Jordan every day from Iraq bearing legitimate scrap metal, but also inestimable amounts of plundered material, said the paper.

The New York Times said one of its reporters saw "piles of valuable copper and aluminium ingots and bars, large stacks of steel rods and water pipe and giant flanges for oil equipment, all in nearly mint condition, as well as chopped-up railroad boxcars, huge numbers of shattered Iraqi tanks and even beer kegs marked with the words 'Iraqi Brewery.'"

The head of the UN International Atomic Energy Agency's verification office in Iraq, Jacques Baute, told the paper that satellite photographs the agency uses to monitor hundreds of military-industrial sites for the removal of sensitive material show "jarring" results.

Entire buildings and complexes of as many as a dozen buildings have vanished from the photographs, he said. "We see sites that have totally been cleaned out," Baute added.

"There is a gigantic salvage operation, stripping anything of perceived value out of the country," said Hamre of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which sent a team to Iraq and issued a report on reconstruction efforts at the request of the Pentagon last July.

"You're going to have to replace all of this stuff," he told NYT. Sam Whit field, a spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority, told the paper that the coalition had put a stop to widespread looting in Iraq.

But a Jordanian engineer at a scrapyard in Sahab, Jordan, pointed to items that did not look like scrap at all. He indicated five-metre-long bars of carbon steel, water pipes 30 centimetres in diameter stacked in triangular piles three metres high and large flanges he identified as oil-well equipment. "It's still new and worth a lot," Muhammad al-Dajah told the Times. "Why are they here? They need it there."-AFP