COB Speicher is the darkish square about 2 clicks outside of town, roughly 10 o'clock from the Tikrit sign on this map. Whole lotta brown around here.
Interestingly enough, Saddam had a lot of vegetation planted here. There are Cypress trees and a fair amount of shrubbery, and apparently when we first came through it was well-irrigated and pretty green, unlike the dusty wasteland we live in today. the idea was apparently to hide the activities of the Air Force and whatever other nefarious crap he had going on here (assuming there are all kinds of nasty chemicals bouncing around here that I won't know I should care about for another 5-10 years). I guess it worked to keep things incognito from the ground, but from the air it makes it completely obvious there's a base here - hence the big dark square in the middle of the desert. If you know what you're looking for, you can clearly spot the base in satellite photos wide enough to show the entire middle east. The Google maps pics aren't quite contrasty enough to really show the effect, but I have access to a little better system at work that makes it quite obvious from way out in space.
Sweet hiding spot.
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