UN weapons inspectors fly out of Iraq

The UN weapons inspectors today flew out of Iraq after US President George Bush issued Saddam Hussein a final ultimatum to go into exile or face war.

A plane carrying the inspectors took off from Saddam International Airport at 7.25am Irish time. It was bound for a UN facility in Larnaca, Cyprus.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan ordered the inspectors, their support staff, humanitarian workers and UN observers along the Iraq-Kuwait border to quit Iraq yesterday after US threats to launch a war.

Bush last night gave Saddam and his sons 48 hours to leave Iraq or face a US-led invasion.

But Iraq rejected the ultimatum, warning that any US attack to force Saddam out of power would be “a grave mistake”.

Defiant to the end, the Iraqi leader warned that American forces would find an Iraqi soldier ready to die for his country “behind every rock, tree and wall”.

But he did make one last minute bid to avert war, acknowledging that Iraq had once possessed weapons of mass destruction – but only to defend itself from Iran and Israel, and he insisted it no longer had them.

“We are not weapons collectors,” he told the Tunisian Foreign Minister Habib Ben Yahia, who was visiting Baghdad in a last gasp diplomatic mission.

“When Saddam Hussein says he has no weapons of mass destruction, he means what he says,” Saddam said.

UN weapons inspectors arrived in Baghdad for the first time in four years on November 27, 2002 and resumed inspections two days later. During four months of inspections, arms experts travelled the length of the country hunting for banned weapons of mass destruction.

Chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix has said that during those inspections, inspectors never found any “smoking gun”.

“It is unfortunate we have to leave now,” the inspectors’ spokesman Hiro Ueki said at the airport. “I think all the inspectors and support staff have done our best.”

Diplomats from Germany, the Czech Republic, India, China, Bahrain and Britain, were already leaving Iraq as well as neighbouring Kuwait amid fears that Baghdad could retaliate against any US-led war.

Baghdad residents prepared for the worst, flooding markets to stock up on food, queuing up for fuel and bread and taping their windows for fear of flying glass from US bombs.

Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf said Saddam would not leave. “He will stay in place like a solid rock,” he told Qatar-based television broadcaster Al-Jazeera.

The threat of war mounted after the US, Britain and Spain said they would not put their resolution seeking approval to use military force against Iraq to a vote because of a threatened French veto.

More than 250,000 US and British troops are in the Gulf poised to strike.

As they prepared for possible action, US military officers in the Kuwaiti desert issued troops ammunition and showed them photographs of Iraqi soldiers so they could differentiate the different units and ranks.

British Royal Marines gathered around portable radios to wait for any news on how soon they may go to war.