- JERUSALEM (December 7) -- Iraq's President
Saddam Hussein is building up secret stockpiles of weapons which will enable
him to wage germ warfare on a vast scale, while retaining such delivery
systems as Scud missiles despite the renewed presence of United Nations
arms inspectors in Iraq, according to the Iraqi opposition.
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- To evade the international probe of his
unconventional arsenal, Saddam has successfully camouflaged his entire
network of military industries as bogus civilian firms, according to the
sources.
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- Ahmad Allawi, an anti-Saddam activist
who regularly debriefs Iraqi defectors upon their arrival at his base in
Suleiminiya, a city in northern Iraq under UN control, contends that Baghdad's
clandestine military buildup far outstrips the inspectors' ability to check,
verify, and stop it.
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- Allawi described the cases in which Iraqi
authorities were compelled to blow up illicit weapons as marginal, compared
to the pace and at which weapons of mass destruction are being produced.
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- The opposition Iraqi National Congress,
which has an office in London, reported these infractions of the post-Gulf
War restrictions to the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM), headed by Australia's
Richard Butler, but to no avail, he said.
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- Contacted in London where he has been
updated by the INC, Allawi said the allies were able to destroy 80 percent
of Iraq's military production centers after the war. But he said Saddam
immediately repaired them, changed their names, and put them back to work.
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- The Al-Kindi facility in Mosul, for one,
has been fully reconstituted and now produces two biological agents capable
of causing outbreaks of bubonic plague in animals and humans, said Allawi.
He estimated that 50 tubes a day, each containing five cc's, are coming
off the plant's assembly line. In addition, it is churning out bacteria
and viruses that cause measles, pneumonia, and mad cow disease in humans.
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- Allawi charged that the Iraqi regime
has been concealing large quantities of these weapons in the Badoush Dam,
near Mosul. He estimated that Iraq has 1,200 facilities making lethal substances
of which only seven were visited by UNSCOM inspectors.
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- "Thirty percent of these sites were
built for the Iraqis by Russian and French firms and the rest were built
by Iraq itself," he said.
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- UNSCOM was credited by him with having
destroyed three million liters of materials destined for chemical warfare.
However, he contended that Iraq's El Yarmuk and El Kassir plants produce
seven to eight million liters a month.
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- He cited two major plants that operate
under phony names: El Assir which supposedly makes insulin and Hejr which
purports to produce agricultural products.
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- Turning to the reported destruction of
Iraq's Scud missile inventory by UNSCOM, Allawi described it as a virtual
hoax. He conceded that 140 Scud missiles were destroyed by UNSCOM, but
charged that the Iraqis had removed their engines in advance and replaced
them with bogus replicas brought from the El Kaaka plant, which is part
of the military's vast network of production facilities.
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