I have no doubt that this is where Saddam’s WMD ended up.

Josef Bodansky was the Director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare. His book
The Secret History of the Iraq War, describes a series on incidents that leads credence to the theory that Saddam got his WMD into Syria before his Iraq fell.

“On April 5, Saddam again failed to show up for an advertised address on Iraqi TV. Instead, an announcer read a message. While heavy artillery fire resumed that night on the airport compound, the anticipated Iraqi ground offensive failed to materialize. Russian intelligence sources reported, however, that a group from the Republican Guard and other units of the regular army from the Tikrit area made their way to Syria in a daring operation including three hundred tanks, one hundred GRAD multiple-barrel rocket launders (MBRLs), many of which had chemical warheads, and many other weapons systems, including Iraq’s entire WMD arsenal. Lebanese sources with access to eastern Syria confirmed the arrival of the column.” [Page 231]

Global Security seems to confirm this as well:

“In a briefing for journalists reported on October 29, 2003, the director of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency said satellite images showed a heavy flow of traffic from Iraq into Syria just before the American invasion in March 2003. Retired Air Force Lieutenant General James Clapper Jr. said he believed “unquestionably” that illicit weapons material was transported into Syria and perhaps other countries. He said “I think people below the Saddam- Hussein-and-his-sons level saw what was coming and decided the best thing to do was to destroy and disperse. … I think probably in the few months running up to the onset of the conflict, I think there was probably an intensive effort to disperse into private hands, to bury it, and to move it outside the country’s borders.”
http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/iraq/cw.htm

More from Bodansky:

“…the tighter cooperation was the early November appearance in eastern Syria of VIP convoys comprising some fifteen vehicles and mixed security details made up of Syrian Presidential Guards’ Special Forces and I Iraqi Special Guards’ Special Forces. These convoys were used by Iraqi and Syrian senior officers in their inspections of forward bases. Lebanese:
sources insist that Saddam Hussein used one of these convoys during a rare visit to Syria for consultations with Syrian and Iraqi senior officials.
In these high-level contacts, the former Iraqi senior officials grudgingly acknowledged that Saddam was not likely to return to power in Baghdad anytime soon. Therefore, Damascus decided to reduce the profile of its strategic cooperation with Saddam’s Baghdad—particularly on issues pertaining to WMD. Toward this end, the Iraqi stockpiles then stored near Kamishli were now moved to permanent storage sites in central Syria and northeastern Lebanon. The moving and concealment of the Iraqi WMD were conducted under the command of General Zou al-Himma-al-Shaleesh, a veteran of Syrian-Iraqi strategic cooperation and smuggling Assaf Shawqat, Bashar’s brother-in-law and deputy chief of Syrian military intelligence, personally supervised the undertaking. The first specific account of this action to transfer and hide of the Iraqi WMD was provided by Syrian opposition journalist Nizar Nayyouf, on the basis of detailed maps and notes he had received from “a Syrian senior officer who’d come a dissident.” Several Lebanese, Syrian, and other Arab seat, and/or intelligence sources subsequently confirmed Nayyouf’s reports and provided additional details about the whereabouts of Iraq’s WMD.
First to be moved were the large tanks containing chemical materials. They were put on flatbed trucks and moved to areas of northeastern Lebanon under Syrian military control where they were buried in pits near Hermel and in the northern Bekaa. The Iraqi operational weapons and other sensitive military components were transferred to three sites associated with comparable Syrian military activities. Most weapons and military equipment were moved in large wooden crates and barrels on flatbed trucks and by rail car; the most sensitive elements were transferred in ambulances. The Iraqi weapons and systems were concealed in three places at the heart of the Syrian military-industrial complex where they could be used to improve Syria’s own weapons and missile production.
Iraqi chemical warheads, ballistic missiles, and missile components (mainly engines and guidance kits) were concealed in North Korean-built tunnels in al-Baida, about 2 kilometers from Misyaf near Hama, the site of Syria’s main SCUD and warheads factories. The tunnel complex is controlled by Bureau 489 of the Cipher and Document Security Division of Syrian intelligence – the agency responsible for the security of Syria’s most sensitive facilities. Vitral parts of Iraq’s WMD munitions were stored in a Syrian Air Force munitions factory near the village of Tal Sinan, between the towns of Hama and Salamiyyah. This factory produces aerial munitions and tanks for the Syrian Air Force.” [pp 438, 439]

Not that Syria didn’t have Chemical weapons before they acquired Saddam’s. There was a report out that Syria had chemical weapons for at least a decade before the Iraq invasion.

So the questions become, if this was chemical and not nuclear warheads they were loading, were they Assad’s or Saddam’s? Were the Scuds Syria’s or the ones Saddam smuggled out?

georgej on September 19, 2007 at 2:39 AM