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Inspectors Will Fly to Baghdad on Monday
Thursday, November 14, 2002
(11.45 AM)
By David Usborne
The New Zealand Herald

The UN remains anxious lest Mr. Bush abandons the multinational arena and decides to act unilaterally at the first sign of non-cooperation by Iraq. An empty declaration on 8 December could be the trigger. "The next red flag will be the declaration that Iraq is required to make," agreed Terry Taylor, a former weapons inspector. “If the declaration is a nil declaration, I am not certain that Washington will accept that as credible"

NEW YORK -- NZH
An advance party of about 25 international inspectors will fly to Baghdad on Monday to begin preparing for an urgent resumption of their mission to hunt down weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and to challenge Baghdad's claim -- reiterated yesterday -- that it is "clean" and has no such arsenal.

The team, headed by Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, and by Mohammed al Baradei, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, will first leave for a staging base in Cyprus tomorrow before flying on to Baghdad after the weekend.

Iraq last night said it was unconditionally accepting a UN resolution passed last Friday giving it a final chance to disarm and giving Mr. Blix 45 days to resume inspections. By that date, Mr. Blix will have about 100 inspectors on the ground.

The task for the advance team will be to reopen and re-equip offices for the inspectors in Baghdad that were abandoned four years ago when the last UN inspectors pulled out.

There was some cheer at UN headquarters that Iraq had bowed to the resolution two days before a 7-day deadline and done so without setting conditions. But there was grave alarm that the Iraqi ambassador in New York, Mohammed Al-Douri, simultaneously insisted that Iraq retained no banned weapons.

Under the terms of the resolution, Iraq must submit within 30 days, by December 8, a declaration laying out for inspectors the true extent of its weapons programmes.
(More: A New Zealand Herald News Source)
2002 © Newswire.

Dan