Iraq weapons search lacks drive

By PHIL REEVES in Baghdad

Every day for the last fortnight Salam Salom, a top Iraqi railwayman, has sat down with the Americans and discussed the bomb-damaged track, the wrecked communications network and looters who descended on the rolling stock like locusts.

But one subject has not come up. There has never been any mention of chemical or biological weapons.

"They have not discussed this with me," said Salom, after yet another round of talks with a United States Army officer in the imperious monolith erected by the British in 1953 to serve as Baghdad's main railway terminal. "Perhaps they talked to the director-general about it, but it has not been raised with me."

If true, this is remarkable.

The Americans are supposedly conducting an intensive search to find the illicit weapons programme whose alleged existence served as a pretext for the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Three months ago, US Secretary of State Colin Powell told the United Nations Security Council that the US had a first-hand description of mobile biological weapons factories that ran on wheels and rails so they could be moved to evade detection.

He went into considerable detail, saying the US had an eyewitness, an Iraqi chemical engineer who supervised one of the mobile biological laboratories and was present during a 1998 production run that went wrong, killing 12 technicians.

Powell told the Security Council how the Iraqis would begin a production run on Thursday at midnight, because they believed the UN weapons inspection team would not carry out operations on Friday, the Muslim holy day.

Salom is traffic manager for the entire 2000km rail network - high in the pecking order in the Baathist-dominated management structure of Iraqi national railways. He may well be a stranger to Saddam Hussein's closest military secrets, but one might expect him at least to be asked about the issue by US officials.

"I heard it on the news," said Salom of Powell's claims. "I thought, 'That's just not true. We have nothing like that, nothing'."

However, he did claim to know about another secret Iraqi military project.

Seven years ago, he said, plans were drawn up to create missile launchers on rails. The idea was rejected by Saddam, who concluded that the launchers would be easy to detect by military satellite and provide a simple target for US and British warplanes.

At this point, Salom changed the subject. He refused to answer further questions on the alleged mobile biological weapons labs, declaring the subject to be "inappropriate".

Suggestions that the Americans are surprisingly disinterested in their mission to unearth weapons of mass destruction come as no surprise to many Iraqis, who have long maintained that the US occupation is about seizing their oil.

This is certainly the view of ticket inspector Ali Muhsan al-Kinani, 42, a railwayman for 25 years.

He pointed out that the Americans had done nothing to weed out the upper echelons of the Iraqi railway company. US officials were working closely with the same men who made workers' lives a misery by jailing them for minor administrative offences, or levying large fines if they were involved in an accident.

The Americans have also yet to speak to him about mobile biological weapons labs.

He said if they did so, they would draw a blank.

But they would also hear about the existence of a top secret and mysterious "special train".

Al-Kinani described a train that moved constantly around the railway system, and which he believed might have contained chemical weapons.

He said the train first appeared around 1996. Its wagons were brown, unmarked and cylindrical with four or five wagons, although these were sometimes mixed with ordinary rolling stock to disguise it.

Discussion of its movements, or even its existence, was forbidden. It was usually attended by troops from the Special Republican Guard, he said.

"It didn't run on the same tracks that ordinary trains run on," said al-Kinani. "UN inspectors did come here, but they didn't see the train."

Shehad Ahmed al-Alami, 30, a train driver, said he, too, had seen the train.

"Drivers would just be told to come with their engines and hook up the carriages. On the special train we were not allowed to leave our cabins. We would just hook up and say nothing."

This train may have been doing nothing more sinister than carrying sanctions-busting oil. But it is strange - almost as strange as the Americans' lack of interest in finding out more.

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Herald Feature: Iraq