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Saddam Hussein's chemical warfare development and use can be divided into three phases: Phase 1 : January 1981 to June 1983, Iraq started testing chemical weapons. Phase 2 : August 1983 to December 1983, chemical weapons were used to a limited extent.
The know-how and material for developing chemical weapons were obtained by Saddam's regime from foreign sources. [45] Most precursors for chemical weapons production came from Singapore (4,515 tons), the Netherlands (4,261 tons), Egypt (2,400 tons), India (2,343 tons), and West Germany (1,027 tons). One Indian company, Exomet Plastics, sent ...
Chemical weapons were used extensively, with post-war Iranian estimates stating that more than 100,000 Iranians were affected by Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons during the eight-year war with Iraq. [43] Iran today is the world's second-most afflicted country by weapons of mass destruction, only after Japan.
The Iraqi chemical weapons program, which had been active since the 1970s, was aimed at regulated offensive use, as evidenced in the chemical attacks against Iraqi Kurds as part of the Anfal campaign in the late 1980s. The Iraqis had also utilized chemical weapons against Iranian hospitals and medical centres. [2]
Hiltermann says that when the Iraqi military turned its chemical weapons on the Kurds during the war, killing approximately 5,000 people in the town of Halabja and injuring thousands more, the Reagan administration sought to obscure Iraqi leadership culpability by suggesting, inaccurately, that the Iranians were partially responsible for the ...
Hussein ended his nuclear program in 1991. ISG found no evidence of concerted efforts to restart the program, and Iraq's ability to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program progressively decayed after 1991. Iraq destroyed its chemical weapons stockpile in 1991, and only a small number of old, abandoned chemical munitions were discovered by the ISG.
It is "perfectly obvious", wrote Pacepa, that the Russian GRU agency helped Saddam Hussein to destroy, hide, or transfer his chemical weapons prior to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. "After all, Russia helped Saddam get his hands on them in the first place." [12]
[a] He was a member of the Bejat clan of the Al-Bu Nasir tribe, to which his elder cousin Saddam Hussein also belonged. Saddam later relied heavily on the clan and tribe to fill senior posts in his government. Like Saddam, al-Majid also was a Sunni Muslim [11] who came from a poor tribal