(snip) Marines discovered at least two caches of Iraq military warheads in the Iraqi countryside that were being tested as possible chemical or biological weapons.
Military sources said that warheads were found in Aziziyah, about 55 miles southeast of Baghdad. They were being run through a battery of sophisticated analyses by the military.
Another stash of rockets was found in the central Iraqi town of Sayyid Abid, military sources said, each was equipped with clear vials containing an unknown substance. Military biological hazard teams are investigating.
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Why would a rocket be equipped with clear vials for any other purpose, but to carry a chem or bio weapon? Most can be made duel-use chems and mixed on site. All that's necessesary is a delivery system - like the above rockets - equipped w/ vials. Like the rockets Saddam used before to gas the Kurds.
HALABJA, Iraq: Tears streamed down Fakhradeen Saleem's face on Wednesday as he watched television images of Saddam Hussein's government crumbling in Baghdad.
Listening to his devastating story of loss at the hands of the Baathist administration, it was not hard to see why.
The softly-spoken teacher, 54, took nearly two hours to explain what happened in this run-down northern Iraqi town on March 16, 1988, a date etched in the memory of millions of Kurds.
On that day Iraqi warplanes roared over the town, dropping chemical weapons including nerve agents which killed 5,000 people in the dying days of the war against neighbouring Iran.
Three of Saleem's seven children died of the agents they breathed in. He buried Sangar, a son of six, and Nigeen, a daughter of eight with his own hands before going with the rest of his family to the cemetery, where they lay down expecting to die.
During the panic in Halabja, his eldest daughter took away his infant son, but to this day he does not know if they survived.
"Every now and again people who lost each other that day come back to Halabja from Iran and elsewhere. I keep hoping that one day it will be me."
At the cemetery a second daughter died quietly in her sleep, but the rest of the family survived. The 10-year-old Hawreen was buried by a friend in his garden and reinterred by Saleem three years later.
Among his children, only Tara, a daughter who is now 27, and Bafreen, another daughter of 19, are known to have survived the attack, for which Saddam will be forever despised by Iraq's Kurdish minority.