Mustard gas shells discovered

AL-MUTHANNA STATE ESTABLISHMENT, Iraq -- U.N. inspectors have reported finding a batch of banned weapons in this week's search -- a dozen artillery shells still filled, as they have been for years, with one of man's most dreaded substances: mustard gas.

The shells were discovered in a hangar-like shed in the Iraqi desert, a big, bleak place carpeted with clumps of bird droppings and feathers, detritus of years of abandonment.

For the U.N. arms monitors, locating them was a first -- the first batch of weapons of mass destruction brought under their control in the new round of inspections in Iraq. The inspectors have said little about the results of their work, but finding the mustard gas was no surprise -- the shells were located by other inspectors and tagged for destruction years ago.

The inspectors' time at al-Muthanna, deep in the desolate flats 40 miles northwest of Baghdad, was a workaday five hours in what is fast becoming a professional routine of daily treks to Iraqi military-industrial sites, landmarks to man's inhumanity to man.

Dealing with inspectors

Iraq is also learning to live again under the scrutiny of a U.N. "monitoring, verification and inspection" agency, after a four-year interruption. Its teams, who returned to Iraq last week, strike out each morning for industrial or other sites, on surprise inspections to determine whether Iraq is using them to produce or store prohibited chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.

On this morning, the inspectors led a speeding caravan of pursuing journalists on a looping two-hour drive meant to deceive the Iraqis about their destination. That they ended here in the desert was no surprise: Al-Muthanna was the heart of Iraq's huge chemical weapons program in the 1980s.

Hans Blix, the chief U.N. weapons inspector, concurred. Asked in New York on Friday if the mustard gas was a violation by the Iraqis, he said: "They had been declared before, and that was not news."

The chemical team's special mission Wednesday was to locate and secure the mustard munitions, first inventoried by their predecessors in the 1990s. But they had much more to do as well, checking huge earthen mounds, storage bunkers, spread across the Muthanna landscape.

The bunkers once held tons of material made at al-Muthanna, a product line of some of the deadliest chemical weapons -- sarin, tabun, VX and mustard gas, some of them agents used against Iranian troops and rebellious Iraqi civilians.

In 1991, in the Gulf War, many of al-Muthanna's buildings were destroyed by U.S. bombing. Then, from 1994 to 1997, the U.N. weapons inspectors moved in, wrecking, burning, neutralizing most of what was left.

A recent Iraqi report said those teams destroyed 38,500 artillery shells and other chemical-filled weapons, almost a half-million gallons of liquid material, and 150 pieces of equipment used for concocting the lethal chemicals.

Today, journalists allowed onto the site after the inspection saw storage sheds and roadsides at its center lined with great, rusted vat-like machines, old piping and even empty, crumpled aerial bombs bearing old U.N. stickers and inventory numbers.

The dozen mustard-filled shells were in the U.N. inspectors' inventory of the 1990s, but somehow were not destroyed as their monitoring regime collapsed in 1998, amid U.N.-Iraqi disputes, and the inspectors withdrew from Iraq.

"It's a pretty good quantity of mustard, and we wanted to be sure we knew its whereabouts," Perricos told reporters. "We have already discussed that we should proceed with destruction." For now, the inspectors have sealed off the storage shed holding the shells.

Al-Muthanna was a "very, very important" place in the Iraqi network of weapons of mass destruction, Perricos said. But for the inspectors, he said, it was all in a day's work, as they build up staff and bring in helicopters in the coming days, at the start of what they plan to be visits to hundreds of sites for months to come.