[Arrowhead1952]

But according to the London Sunday Telegraph, Ali Nimir, a former colonel in an Iraqi Republican Guard artillery unit, had also confirmed the find.

"I remember seeing boxes of these kinds of armaments in our base two years ago," Nimir said. "We were told that they were chemical weapons."

"They were removed from our bases and distributed to secret hiding places about a year before the war," he explained. "I never saw them again."

If there were armaments at bases two years ago, wonder where those are buried. Even if the shell are 10 years old, think how bad the condition of the metal shell is. Those shells are an accident waiting to happen.

Artillery shells 10+ years old are still all over Iraq and waiting for the housing to rot away and spill their contents, not good.

[John H K]

One thing to keep in mind is that chemical agents (though this can vary) usually are not stored in warheads, but they are loaded in just prior to use.

One plausible scenario is that at the end of the Iran-Iraq War, some Iraqi company or battalion commander had some mortar shells he'd just loaded but didn't get to use.

Rather than go through the potentially dangerous and time consuming process of taking the chemicals out of the shells, he simply buried them. Quite possibly without telling any superiors or Baghdad (who likely wouldn't have cared that much what happened to them.)

Now, of course, the above scenario will be flamed viciously by people who don't want that to be a possibility, but it's a thousand times more realistic than the idea these shells are part of a grand plan to hide WMDs for use later.