Part One: The Golden Peacock

SCOTT RITTER DEC 27, 2023          READ

After the war concluded, the United Nations created a Special Commission tasked with overseeing Iraq’s disarmament of its chemical, biological, nuclear, and long-range ballistic missile programs, collectively referred to as weapons of mass destruction, or WMD. I had served as a member of the Special Commission since September 1991, and at the time of the Sinjar operation had served on ten inspections, all of which were focused on the SCUD missile accounting issue. We were in Sinjar because, in the closing days of Operation Desert Storm, CIA paramilitary operatives deployed in nearby Syria, using long-range optics, reported seeing convoys of trucks believed to be carrying SCUD missiles, drive into tunnels carved into the base of the mountain. My job was to locate these tunnels and inspect them to see if they still contained missiles, or evidence of missiles having been stored there.