Stewart Stogel
Monday, July 30, 2007

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UNITED NATIONS -- Four years after the invasion of Iraq, a significant number of Saddam Hussein's prohibited weapons are apparently missing.

NewsMax has learned that 25 surface-to-surface missiles, known as the al-Samouds, cannot be accounted for, say sources inside the U.N.

Officials at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad tell NewsMax they too cannot find any records of what happened to the weapons.

The missiles were in the process of being destroyed by U.N. inspectors who evacuated the country just days before the U.S.-British invasion.

The last time they were seen was March 2003.

The al-Samouds are similar(though smaller)to the infamous Soviet Scuds that rained down on Israel during the 1991 Gulf War.

The missiles, with ranges of at least 180 kilometers, exceed U.N. sanctions still in effect since the 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

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Those sanctions limit Iraq to "defensive" arms with a range of 150 kilometers or less.

Such capabilities put cities in Iran, Syria, Turkey, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and even Israel, within range of the Iraqi military, or whoever may now possess the weapons.

UN sources explain that while large, the al-Samouds can be disassembled and easily transported on a simple flatbed truck.

In addition, a new missile uncovered by the U.N. in 2003, the al Fatah, also with prohibited capabilities, remains unaccounted for.

Coincidentally, State Department sources confirm that the Iraqi government of Nouri al Maliki has been lobbying the U.S. to get the remaining sanctions first imposed on the Saddam regime lifted.

The State Department, NewsMax is told by one senior official, has not yet decided how to respond to the Iraqi request.

Last month, the U.N. Security Council, under pressure from Washington, dissolved the U.N. Iraq arms inspectors (UNMOVIC).

U.N. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad told NewsMax that Washington "no longer saw a need" to continue the operations of UNMOVIC.

Since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Washington and London benched the inspectors, refusing to allow them back into the country.

The remaining U.N. personnel are spending their final days "archiving" millions of military documents left from Saddam's regime.

The "ultimate" fate of those documents remains a question.

© NewsMax 2007. All rights reserved.

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