October 13,2008:  U.S. troops in Iraq recently discovered an exceptionally large weapons cache. The main items were 269 122mm rockets (BM-21s weighing 150 pounds each, with a warhead), 200,000 14.5mm machine-gun rounds and bomb making equipment. Tips from local civilians led the troops to the cache. There are still hundreds of such cashes hidden throughout the country, in the hope that the weapons, stolen from government armories in 2003, will be worth something someday. Many of these weapons were sold to Sunni and Shia terrorists in the last five years, although some of the sellers later regretted it. That's because the explosives in these caches were used to make terrorist bombs that killed over 20,000 civilians. Those kinds of attacks quickly became very unpopular. So did anyone supporting the terrorists. It suddenly became unpopular  to have some of Saddams munitions stashed away for a rainy day. Then it became downright dangerous, as the supply of munitions dried up, the remaining ones became much sought after by the terrorists. In the last two years, cash-strapped terrorists have gone after families suspected of having a weapons cache, and used kidnapping and other forms of coercion to get the munitions for free. This led to members of the family frequently calling in the tip that got rid of what had become a curse.