AMERICAN authorities have broadcast a nationwide radio appeal to the Iraqi people offering substantial rewards for information leading to the discovery of weapons of mass destruction.

Seven weeks after the American-led war was launched on the premise of Iraq’s possession of such weapons, the taskforce charged with finding Saddam Hussein’s secret chemical and biological arsenal has yet to find any evidence that it exists.

It emerged yesterday that the inspection team is likely to return to the United States next month. The Washington Post reported that the withdrawal would mark “a milestone in frustration for a major declared objective of the war”.

Iraqi scientists and other high-ranking officials in US custody have proved uniformly unhelpful, insisting that Iraq possessed no such weapons and that any it did have had long since been destroyed.

US weapons experts, basing their search on intelligence provided by the Pentagon, have found no evidence of unconventional weapons programmes at any of the 75 high-priority sites surveyed so far. Several high-sensitivity sites were found to have been looted and burnt before the taskforce had arrived, making an assessment of its previous contents all but impossible.

In its increasing desperation to prove the premise behind the invasion, the United States is turning towards ordinary Iraqis to help in its quest for Saddam’s hidden arsenal, with appeals in Arabic broadcast on the American-run Information Radio, a military-run venture aimed at explaining the American presence in Iraq.

Besides the unspecified reward, potential informants are offered guaranteed anony-mity and safety in exchange for useful information “regarding any site that manufactured or held weapons of mass destruction”. “The reward you may get can improve your living standard,” it said.

The appeal marks a definite and planned shift in emphasis from American to Iraqi sources in the search for the existence of the weapons that the Pentagon believes are still hidden inside Iraq.

American officials have indicated that they are likely to depend increasingly on hoped-for Iraqi informants for intelligence after disappointing results from teams acting on information provided by the Pentagon.

Members of Task Force 75, the frontline military unit charged with the task of tracing the banned weapons, have blamed their disappointing results largely on the quality of the Intelligence given to them by the Pentagon, the same Intelligence on which Washington based its case for war.

They also blame the failure to secure sensitive sites during the advance towards Baghdad, leaving suspected chemical and biological weapons facilities to the mercy of looters.

The only significant finds so far have been the discoveries of two trailers, one this weekend, thought to resemble the mobile biological weapons laboratories described by Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, in his report to the United National Security Council in the run-up to the war. Both trailers, however, were extensively stripped by looters before being handed to American troops.

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