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Iraq II: U.N. Personnel to Arrive Next Week to Prepare for Inspections Preparing for a new round of weapons inspections, 30 U.N. disarmament experts are scheduled to arrive in Iraq Monday to set up communications and inspect a remote system for monitoring dual-use equipment (see related GSN story, today). After that, an advance team of 12 inspectors is scheduled to arrive Nov. 25 to begin spot inspections, the Washington Post reported today. A full team of up to 100 U.N. inspectors is expected to begin work in Iraq by the end of December, according to the Post. With the aid of U.S. and British intelligence and information provided by Iraqi defectors and former U.N. arms experts, inspectors have created a list of more than 1,000 sites suspected of being involved in Iraq’s WMD program. Over the next two months, the inspectors plan to focus their efforts on 100 sites, including an improved missile launch facility located west of Baghdad at al-Rafah and a former nuclear power plant at al-Furat, south of the Iraqi capital. U.N. inspectors also plan to travel to at least one of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s palaces, which had been previously off-limits, as a test of Iraqi compliance with the new U.N. resolution, officials said (see GSN, Oct. 7). “We have a plan of action which we cannot obviously lay out in detail,” said Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who is heading the U.N. nuclear weapons inspection efforts. “But we will have to go and visit some of the facilities which have been relevant in the past” and conduct “no notice inspections” at previously unknown sites, he said. “We would not want to work in an expected fashion; we will have to do some surprise visits to facilities that we might not be expected to visit,” ElBaradei said. Former Iraqi WMD sites are only one component of Iraq’s broader weapons program, ElBaradei added. Inspectors also plan to install a soil, water and air monitoring system to detect chemical or radioactive traces, according to ElBaradei and Hans Blix, head of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, which is responsible for inspecting Iraqi chemical, biological and missile programs. U.N. inspectors plan to request information from U.N. members on Iraqi attempts to purchase weapon-related equipment, the Post reported. They also plan to interview hundreds of Iraqi scientists believed to have been involved in Iraq’s former WMD efforts to determine whether they are still participating in prohibited programs, ElBaradei said (see GSN, Oct. 31). The key to the inspectors’ success, however, is obtaining unimpeded access to any site within Iraq, ElBaradei and other senior U.N. officials said (see GSN, Sept. 25). “If there is a piece of equipment, it will have to be installed; and if it has been installed and is being used, we will have a chance to bump into it,” said Jacques Baute, head of the IAEA’s Iraq action team (Colum Lynch, Washington Post, Nov. 14). For further information, see:
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