Poison gas from the second Iraqi site
Iraq, International, 8/1/1997

A plume of poison gas may have been released from a previously undisclosed Iraqi chemical weapons site that was bombed by US warplanes during the Gulf war, a Pentagon spokesman said. A preliminary CIA model of the dispersion of chemical agents from the site at Ukhaydir in southern Iraq found it was unlikely to have reached the thousands of US troops across the border in Saudi Arabia, the official said.

UN weapons experts announced the existence of the Ukhaydir chemical weapons storage side at a hearing in Buffalo, New York of a presidential panel on Gulf war illnesses, the New York Times reported.

Iraq informed UN weapons inspectors only recently that hundreds of rockets filled with mustard gas and nerve gas were stored at the site during the war, the Times said.

During a visit to the site in April, UN weapons inspectors found damaged 155 mm rocket shells that may once have contained mustard gas as well as bomb craters, the officials said. The Ukhaydir site was bombed by US warplanes on February 14, 1991.

"The CIA has done some modeling," said Air force captain Tom Cilory, a Pentagon spokesman. "Their determination is that the release would not have reached US troops 300 km away." The CIA and the pentagon now will apply a more sophisticated set model to try to determine with greater precision whether poison gas may have reached US troops, he said. Until now, the Pentagon's inquiry, into possible exposure of US troops to deadly chemical agents has focused on Khamisiyah, an Iraqi ammunition dump where US troops in advertently demolished rockets filled with nerve gas.

After months of work devising more sophisticated models to track gas released in that incident, the Pentagon concluded that nearly 100,000 US troops were exposed to trace amounts of nerve gas. Investigators also found that the poison gas could have traveled farther than initially believed, nearly 300 km, and that it was replenished by the evaporation of chemical agents on the ground. The Khamisiyah incident was disclosed just over a year ago by the Pentagon, which had insisted for years that no US troops were exposed to Iraqi chemical agents during or after the war.

The Pentagon denial came in the face of complaints by tens of thousands of Gulf War veterans of unexplained illnesses that they attributed to their service in the 1991 war with Iraq. Because there has been little medical research on the subject, the jury is still out on whether exposure to trace amounts of nerve gas can have long-term adverse health effects.

In light of their Khamisiyah findings, the Pentagon and CIA plan to reexamine their analyses of other Iraqi chemical weapons targets struck during the allied air campaign. The CIA had concluded previously that plumes from the Mohamadiayt and Al Muthana chemical weapons plants, which were bombed during the war, would not have reached US troops.

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