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Washington - The United States and Iraq have started preparing for an offensive by summer to recapture the Iraqi city of Mosul, which was taken by Islamic State (ISIS) militants last June, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. Preparations include selecting and training military units for the planned assault and cutting supply lines to ISIS fighters, General Lloyd Austin, head of the US military's Central Command, told the Journal. Mosul is the largest city in a self-declared ISIS caliphate straddling the border between northern Iraq and eastern Syria. A senior Iraqi official told Reuters in November that Mosul was...

An ISIS chemical weapons expert was killed in an airstrike on Saturday near Mosul, Iraq, U.S. Central Command said in a statement on Friday. Abu Malik worked in a chemical weapons production facility under Saddam Hussein before joining al Qaeda in Iraq in 2005, Central Command said. He then joined ISIS, allowing the terrorist group to make use of his experience in chemical weapons capabilities, according to Central Command. "His death is expected to temporarily degrade and disrupt the terrorist network and diminish ISIL's (ISIS') ability to potentially produce and use chemical weapons against innocent people," the statement said. The...

A US-led coalition air strike killed a chemical weapons specialist with the Islamic State group in Iraq who once worked for Saddam Hussein, US military officers said on Friday. The air raid carried out last Saturday near Mosul took out Abu Malik, whose training "provided the terrorist group with expertise to pursue a chemical weapons capability," the military said in a statement. Malik had worked at a chemical weapons production plant under Saddam's regime and later forged an affiliation with al Qaeda in Iraq in 2005, before joining the extremist IS group, according to Central Command. "His death is expected...

It’s a confirmation of reports in June that ISIS had taken control of a site where some of Saddam’s WMD arsenal remained. Iraq has informed the United Nations that the Islamic State extremist group has taken control of a vast former chemical weapons facility northwest of Baghdad where 2,500 chemical rockets filled with the deadly nerve agent sarin or their remnants were stored along with other chemical warfare agents. Iraq’s U.N. Ambassador Mohamed Ali Alhakim said in a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon circulated Tuesday that “terrorist” groups entered the Muthanna site June 11 and seized weapons and equipment...

Rats or Humans? Inside Saddam's Extermination Plant(August 29, 2002)This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/ He was introduced as director of research and development at Falluja, one of the remote factories where the United States claims Saddam Hussein could be making chemical and biological weapons. Asked if he had worked on any of Saddam's chemical weapons programs, Dr Mohammed Frah played a straight bat: "In the early 1980s I worked for five years on the chemical and biological programs at Al-Muthanna." This is the name of a critical centre in Saddam's weapons program - a huge pesticide complex that produced...

GOTTA SEE THIS - War for Enduring Freedom 12/5/02 - Strike Video, Salman Bak, Al-Tuwaitha, al-Muthanna, Halabja, Mosul BREAKING: Salman Bak, Al-Tuwaitha nuclear complex BREAKING: al-Muthanna - guano and tanks BREAKING: Halabja - ~20 of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan killed or wounded trusting a truce with al Qaeda and Islamic terrorists BREAKING: Mosul - U.S. and British warplanes defended the sky STRIKE VIDEO Iraqi Spoon-rest Radar on a truck. (Note: mpg file is 16.4 MB) From the DoD News Briefing =========== Baghdad =========== In Baghdad, Iraq, inspectors leaving UN HQ. In Iraq, at Salman Bak, at the Al-Tuwaitha nuclear...

Demetrius Perricos, who is leading one of the U.N. inspection teams in Iraq, said Wednesday his team of international arms experts secured about a dozen Iraqi artillery shells containing the mustard liquid agent.

<p>December 5, 2002 -- U.N. weapons inspectors found mustard gas yesterday inside Iraqi artillery shells at a military complex north of Baghdad.</p> <p>The inspectors had already known the gas and shells were stored at the Muthanna military site but hadn't yet been destroyed when the previous inspection team left Iraq in 1998.</p>

The U.S. Marines who guarded the sprawling complex in northwest Iraq where Saddam Hussein’s 1980s war machine churned out some of the most deadly chemical and biological weapons known to man had a name for one especially mysterious bunker: The Dragon’s Egg.

This story is disturbing on multiple levels. It has been revealed that stockpiles of expired or degraded chemical munitions were discovered in Iraq during the initial years of the war and both American and Iraqi forces were exposed to them in more than twenty instances. This information was never revealed to the public. American troops were exposed to chemical weapons multiple times in the years following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, while the Pentagon kept their discoveries of the expired or degraded weapons secret from investigators, fellow soldiers, and military doctors, according to a published report. The New York...

The New York Times...details U.S. forces in Iraq finding thousands of chemical weapons during the Iraq war. "From 2004 to 2011...troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam Hussein’s rule," "In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads

BAGHDAD, March 7, 2006 – The Iraqi air force, along with its coalition partners, officially opened a new air base in Baghdad today. U.S. airmen from Multinational Security Transition Command Iraq's Coalition Air Force Transition Team stand in formation during the formal stand up of the new Al Muthana Air Base in Iraq March 7. Photo by Master Sgt. Will Ackerman, USAF  (Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available. The Al Muthana Air Base, near the international airport, provides a foundation on which Iraq's air force can rebuild with help from its allies, U.S. officials said. On display were two...