Baghdad — Danish and Icelandic troops have uncovered a cache of 36 shells buried in the Iraqi desert, and preliminary tests indicted they may contain a liquid blister agent, the Danish military said Saturday.
The 120-millimetre mortar shells were thought to be leftovers from the eight-year war between Iraq and neighbouring Iran, which ended in 1988, said U.S. Brig.-Gen. Mark Kimmitt.
The shells were found by Danish engineering troops and Icelandic de-miners near Al Quarnah, north of the city of Basra where Denmark's 410 troops are based, the Danish Army Operational Command said in a written statement.
The shells were wrapped in plastic but had been damaged, and they appeared to have been buried for at least 10 years, the statement said.
It said British experts did a preliminary test and said the shells contained "blister gas," but did not elaborate.
Before the war, the United States alleged Iraq still had stockpiles of mustard gas, a First World War-era blister agent that is stored in liquid form. U.S. intelligence officials also claimed Iraq had sarin, cyclosarin and VX, which are extremely deadly nerve agents.
"We're doing some preliminary tests to ensure that if they do contain any kind of blister agent that we can dispose of them properly," Brig.-Gen. Kimmitt said.
The Danish military emphasized that the tests were not definitive. In the weeks after the Iraq war, the U.S.-led coalition found several caches that tested positive for mustard gas but later turned out to contain missile fuel or other chemicals.
Other discoveries turned out to be old caches that had already been tagged by United Nations inspectors and were scheduled for destruction.
Saddam Hussein's regime used chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers during that war and killed an estimated 5,000 Kurdish civilians in a chemical attack on the northern city of Halabja in 1988.
President George W. Bush said the United States was going to war to destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, but a nine-month search by a succession of U.S. teams has failed to find any current stockpiles of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.
The lack of evidence has led critics to suggest the Bush administration either mishandled or exaggerated its knowledge of Iraq's alleged arsenal.
