BEATING SWORDS INTO PLOUGHSHARES

Following the Biblical call to turn swords into ploughshares, junkyard owner Ahmad Ali Thalib is converting scrapped jet fighters into pots and pans...

''We're also selling to scrap dealers in Lebanon, Turkey and Iran, but some of this ends up as cooking containers for Iraqis,'' he said...

The now-defunct Iraqi Air Force was once considered the best in the Arab world. Founded in 1931, it fought in numerous conflicts in the Middle East, battling the British in 1941 and Israel in 1948 and 1967...

Saddam invested a huge portion of the country's oil wealth to equip the Air Force, which was used to some effect during the 1980-88 war with Iran. At its zenith in the late 1980s, it listed nearly 750 combat aircraft in its inventory, including Soviet MiGs and Sukhois and French Mirage fighters...

But the air force took a beating after the invasion of Kuwait in 1990, when the U.S.-led aerial onslaught during the first Gulf War severely depleted its ranks. Hundreds of planes either fled to neighboring Iran where they were inducted into the Iranian Air Force or were destroyed in the fighting.

Subsequent U.N. sanctions only made things worse. Hundreds of planes were cannibalized for spare parts, and by 2002 only 100 airworthy jets remained in squadron service...

The Air Force played no role in the latest war. Instead, it desperately sought to protect its assets either by hiding them, or burying them in the desert.

After the war, U.S. teams hunting for alleged weapons of mass destruction found dozens of intact fighter jets buried beneath the sand, including the Mach 3-capable MiG-25s. Others were hidden in groves of trees and covered with thick camouflage netting.

Today, hundreds of derelict planes litter abandoned air bases, rusting in the winter rains and providing scrap metal dealers with a bonanza in aluminum and other metals.

Thalib said that the 50 MiG-23s and MiG-25s strewn across the muddy scrapyard on Baghdad's northern outskirts were once worth nearly a billion dollars. He said he purchased the entire fleet for $150,000 from a contractor engaged by the Americans to clear the derelict aircraft from a former air base.