UN inspectors head for Iraqi uranium mine

International nuclear monitors struck out across the Iraqi desert today, heading for a remote uranium mining site, officials in Baghdad said.

The trip was one of five inspections mounted today – a marked expansion of the United Nations field operation. Still more inspectors were flying to Iraq later today.

Iraq’s chief liaison to the UN teams, meanwhile, said the Iraqis have found the inspectors to be “calm and professional”.

But he again complained about last week’s surprise visit to one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces, calling it a provocation inspired by Washington.

Today marked the end of the second week of UN field missions. The monitors returned to Iraq after a four-year absence under a Security Council resolution requiring Baghdad to give up any remaining chemical or biological weapons, and shut down any programmes to make them.

Iraq denies it still has such weapons, or ambitions to build them.

The Iraq field missions were expanding as UN analysts began combing through 12,000 pages of documents submitted by Iraq to the UN over the weekend.

The dossier details past programmes of weapons of mass destruction and what Iraq says are purely civilian programmes today in the chemical, biological and nuclear areas.

Inspections in the 1990s, after Iraq’s Gulf War defeat, led to the destruction of tons of chemical and biological weapons, and to the dismantling of Iraq’s programme to try to build atomic bombs.

The mining operations at Ashakat, in the desert near the Syrian border, 250 miles west of Baghdad, were studied by UN nuclear inspectors in the 1990s.

In the 1980s, the phosphate deposits at Ashakat had been exploited for their uranium content as well as for fertiliser, producing about 100 tons of uranium over six years.

Other nuclear inspectors headed again for al-Tuwaitha, Iraq’s major nuclear research centre, 15 miles southeast of Baghdad, Iraqi Information Ministry officials said.

It was the monitors’ third recent visit to the sprawling complex, where Iraqi scientists in the 1980s worked on developing technology for enriching uranium to levels usable in bombs.

A third UN team was reported to have gone to a veterinary medicine establishment at Abu Ghraib, just west of Baghdad – presumably the Amariyah Serum and Vaccine Institute, site of biological weapons-related research in the 1980s.

That institute is reported to have expanded its storage capacity, to an extent the US government says exceeds Iraq’s needs. Iraq contends the facility only makes and stores human vaccines.

Other inspectors were reported to have visited a military training centre in Baghdad and an industrial facility at al-Furat, just south of the Iraqi capital, today. The purposes of those visits were not immediately known.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair said it would be “naive” to believe Saddam plans to comply with UN demands for his disarmament in the field of weapons of mass destruction.

“If there is a breach and Saddam doesn’t comply, then we are prepared to take action,” Mr Blair told the Financial Times.

Later today, about 25 additional inspectors were scheduled to arrive from a UN rear base on Cyprus, bolstering the UN inspection staff to approximately 70.

Inspection team leaders have said they hope to have eight teams working by the end of the year.

In an interview published today in the weekly al-Rafidayn, Lieutenant General Hossam Mohammed Amin, chief Iraqi liaison, said of the inspectors’ “behaviour”: “We are satisfied with it so far because it is calm and professional.”

Iraqi officials have complained sharply, however, about the UN inspection of Baghdad’s al-Sajoud palace on December 3, one of Saddam’s many presidential palaces. Amin reiterated that criticism.

“The visit took place under pressure from the United States of America to create a crisis or confrontation between Iraq and inspection teams, but this did not happen,” he said.

Such palace inspections contributed to the UN-Iraqi tensions that ended with the collapse of the previous inspection regime in 1998. The new UN resolution declares the monitors have unrestricted power to inspect such sites.

Asked how long he expects the new UN inspections to take, Amin said if the inspection agencies are “sincere,” he thinks they should take eight months.

“Then the Security Council should suspend the sanctions imposed on Iraq and the monitoring process would continue,” he said.

He was referring to international economic sanctions imposed on Iraq after it invaded Kuwait in 1990, and to UN plans to establish a long term system of monitoring Iraq’s military-industrial complex – via surveillance gear, required reports and periodic visits.