UN inspectors have roadmap ready

With Iraq's announcement on Wednesday that it will accept tough new UN inspection terms, a team of disarmament experts will likely arrive in Baghdad on Monday to restart their surveillance cameras, install their communications equipment and begin the most intrusive weapons inspection operation in modern history.

Armed with tips and evidence amassed by Iraqi defectors, former UN arms experts and American and British intelligence agencies over the past decade, the UN inspection team has created a roadmap of more than 1,000 sites that inspectors will potentially visit in their search of Iraq's suspected chemical, biological and nuclear weapons arsenals.

Over the next two months, UN inspectors will be zeroing in on a priority list of more than 100 sites, including an upgraded missile launch facility at Al Rafah, a former nuclear power plant at Al Furat, and a chlorine production facility in the town of Fallujah outside Baghdad that once produced precursors for Iraq's nerve and blister agents, according to U.S. and UN sources. They are also expected to visit at least one of eight presidential compounds to test whether Iraq is willing to provide full compliance, officials said.

U.S. and British intelligence agencies maintain that these and other sites previously damaged by U.S. war planes or destroyed by UN weapons inspectors have been rebuilt and expanded by Iraq since the inspectors left the country in December 1998, on the eve of a U.S.-British bombing campaign.

"We have a plan of action which we cannot obviously lay out in detail," Mohammed El Baradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said in an interview. "But we will have to go and visit some of the facilities which have been relevant in the past" and conduct "no notice inspections" at previously unknown sites.

"We would not want to work in an expected fashion; we will have to do some surprise visits to facilities that we might not be expected to visit."

El Baradei, an Egyptian arms expert who will head the UN's efforts to uncover Iraq's nuclear weapons programme, said that these former sites represent only a piece of the broader picture of Iraq's weapons programme. El Baradei and his counterpart Hans Blix, the head of the UN Monitoring Verification and Inspection Commission, which is responsible for ridding Iraq of chemical and biological weapons and long range missiles, said that the UN inspectors will set up an elaborate system of soil, water and air sampling equipment to determine whether there are traces of chemicals or radioactive materials in the air.

© Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service