BAGHDAD, 2 February 2003 — President Saddam Hussein vowed yesterday to kill one million enemy soldiers if they tried to take Baghdad but offered to cooperate with the UN disarmament process after inviting the chief UN weapons inspectors back to Iraq.
“The enemy will not enter Baghdad’s suburbs because he will die. Even if they send a million soldiers, our boys will kill them,” Saddam told senior military aides. “The enemy will land in remote regions and film it,” the Iraqi strongman said, according to reports released to the official press.
Saddam charged that the “enemy media will then start saying that they are at some distance from Ramadi (west of Baghdad) or somewhere else and now on its way to invade this or that city”.
“This is how they are going to put on their show,” he added.
As Washington presses the UN Security Council to authorize war, the press said Saddam had reviewed with top aides, including Defense Minister Sultan Hashem and son Qussay, strategies to defeat an enemy landing while limiting Iraqi losses.
Iraq also threatened suicide attacks. “Suicide attacks are our new weapons,” Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan told the German news magazine Der Spiegel, adding: “The whole region will be set ablaze. This part of the world will become a sea of resistance and danger for Americans.”
Neighboring countries hosting US troops would be especially singled out,” Ramadan said.
As a US-British arms buildup in the Gulf continued, a large British naval flotilla, including an aircraft carrier and helicopter carrier, plus a US submarine passed through Egypt’s Suez Canal. The vessels entered the canal from the Mediterranean Sea under tight security and crossed the waterway into the Red Sea on way to the Gulf.
Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz said chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix would travel to Iraq on Feb. 8. He said Blix would not meet with Saddam.
Blix and his counterpart, nuclear arms expert Mohamed El Baradei, were invited to Baghdad by Iraqi officials after they delivered a scathing report to the United Nations last Monday.
They said Iraq had not provided enough information to help them verify whether Baghdad still possessed weapons of mass destruction or had destroyed previous banned weapons programs.
Iraq denied yesterday a US news report alleging it had imported materials that could be used to produce chemical weapons and long-range missiles from an Indian firm. “This is disinformation, part of a campaign waged by Western media to distort Iraq’s position,” said Zuhair Al-Qazzaz, director of the Al-Tareq company overseeing the Fallujah II plant where the weapon-making materials allegedly ended up.
Citing Indian court records, the Los Angeles Times reported Jan. 19 that an Indian trading firm used front companies, phony customs declarations and other false documents to export materials that could be used by Iraq to produce chemical weapons and long-range missiles.
It said the company, NEC Engineering Private Ltd., made shipments valued at nearly $800,000 of highly specialized supplies such as atomized aluminum powder and titanium centrifugal pumps between September 1998 and February 2001.
The exports ostensibly went to Jordan and Dubai, but ultimately were tracked to Iraq’s Fallujah II chlorine plant and a rocket fuel production facility at Al-Mamoun, the LA Times reported, citing US and British intelligence reports.
Qazzaz said that contrary to the newspaper’s claim, Baghdad had accounted for all its dealings with the Indian firm in the declaration. He said his company had in 1999 imported materials from NEC, shipped via the Jordanian port of Aqaba, to rehabilitate a chlorine plant in Fallujah II. “Following its rehabilitation, the plant produced chlorine, caustic soda and hydrochloric acid for civilian use, which have nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction,” Qazzaz said. (Agencies)
