US abandons fruitless search for Saddam’s weapons

Mark Sage, New York

Officials with the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) the body established to find the weapons which justified the war have returned to the US amid growing dangers from insurgents in Iraq.

An interim report, written by former ISG head Charles Duelfer, will serve as the group's final conclusions, according to the Washington Post.

The Duelfer document contradicted virtually all the pre-war claims from London and Washington about Saddam possessing biological and chemical weapons, and reconstituting Iraq's nuclear programme.

An intelligence official told the newspaper that the chances of weapons being hidden inside Iraq, or having been shipped out of the country before the war, were very small.

The search was called off amid the growing insurgency and risk of attack or kidnap in Iraq.

Every single suspect site in Iraq has been inspected by the ISG or plundered by insurgents and looters.

Most of the suspects have also been questioned.

"We've talked to so many people that someone would have said something," an intelligence official told the newspaper.

"We received nothing that contradicts the picture we've put forward. It's possible there is a supply some place, but what is much more likely is that we will find a greater substantiation of the picture that we've

already put forward," he said. The ISG still exists and is based at the Pentagon under Marine Corps Brigadier General Joseph McMenamin.

The group is now mainly concentrating on counter-insurgency work.

The ISG has urged the Pentagon to release scientists who have been questioned at length about Iraq's weapons capabilities.

They are General Amir Saadi, a liaison between Saddam's government and UN inspectors; Rihab Taha, a biologist nicknamed "Dr Germ" in the West; her husband, Amir Rashid, the former oil minister; and Huda Amash, another biologist who earned the nickname "Mrs Anthrax".

The ISG determined that none of the scientists had been involved in Iraqi weapons programmes since the first Gulf War, the newspaper reported.

In Iraq, insurgents launched a string of attacks in Mosul, as part of their campaign of violence before the January 30 elections, killing two Iraqi National Guardsmen and wounding two others in a car bombing, a day after another ambush killed three Iraqis.

A US soldier assigned to the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force was killed in the Anbar province.