(Photo credit: Maj. Charlie Dietz, DVIDS. Original caption: Assailants and attackers set fire to the perimeter wall of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq, Jan. 1, 2020.)
The U.S. government estimates an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, likely referring to a dramatic incident on New Year’s Eve 2019, caused some $35 million-worth of damage, according to a new report.
The price tag comes in a footnote in a recent report [PDF] from the State Department’s Inspector General about the department’s global fire prevention strategy.
“Of the $37,291,962 total loss, which occurred in FY 2020, $35 million was attributable to a fire at Embassy Baghdad following a terrorist attack,” the footnote says.
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While the report doesn’t give the exact date of the attack, fiscal year 2020 covers a period from October 2019 through September 2020, and it’s likely referring to Dec. 31, 2019.
It was on that day that Iraqis — members and supporters of a pro-Iranian militia, according to the Pentagon — breached the embassy grounds and set fire to parts of it including, reportedly, the reception area and the fuel depot. U.S. officials said the protest-turned-attack came in response to prior lethal U.S. airstrikes on the militias. (When asked for clarification about the IG report, a spokesperson for the State Department’s Bureau of Overseas Building Operations only told Code and Dagger that “the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad’s access points sustained damage as a result of the hostile militia attacks in Baghdad on December 31, 2019.”)
The fuel depot fire was put out before it could cause a larger explosion, according to a detailed report in TIME.
The State IG report doesn’t discuss the Baghdad incident any further, but TIME reported at the time that some $20 million of the damage was done to high-security gates that were designed to buy time for those inside in the event of an attack. Paraphrasing a “senior security official,” TIME reported that the gates were “deemed money well spent.”
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Despite the hefty price tag to come later, the Department of Defense downplayed the effect of the attack, saying that for an embassy compound that’s bigger than Vatican City, it amounted to relatively little damage.
“[S]o what you saw, essentially, in my mind, anyway, having been over there, is a show — a demonstration, so to speak — in the sense of for the cameras as much as anything else,” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley told reporters two days after the incident.
The Baghdad fire was an outlier in the State Department’s IG report, which covered incidents from 2006 to late 2020. Compared to the over $37 million price tag for FY 2020, the report notes another year where damaged amounted to less than $360,000.
The report notes there have been three fatalities in fire incidents in the past 14 years at U.S. facilities abroad: that of one local hire in Islamabad in 2006, a foreign service officer in Moscow in 2014 and a local contractor in Addis Ababa in 2017.
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