User:Hcberkowitz/Sandbox-Egyptian support for Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war

Egypt has a highly developed weapons production capacity, second in the Middle East only to Israel.

Motivations for Policy
Egyptian relations with Iraq go back many years, but one key date was 1959, when Egypt gave Saddam Hussein asylum, as he escaped from failing to assassinate Gen. Abd al-Karim Qasim, then the head of Iraq, who eventually was overthrown in 1963. Saddam both formed positive relations with Egyptian security personnel, who were also annoyed that Saddam was visiting the U.S. Embassy in Cairo. See CIA activities in the Near East, North Africa, South and Southwest Asia.

So, subsequent Egyptian relations with Iraq were affected by both personal relationships with Saddam, as well as with the Ba'ath Party, which Saddam did not, at first, lead. Anwar Sadat's 1977 trip to Israel and subsequent U.S. support to Egypt, as part of the peace arrangement with Israel, may have had an indirect effect on Egyptian-Iraqi relations, and the US tilt to Iraq.

Tanks and other armored fighting vehicles
Includes both new equipment, and repair and ammunition to old equipment

Infantry equipment
Includes rifles, handheld rocket launchers like the RPG, useful against both tanks and buildings. Trying to decide if shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles should go here or to Air Defense.

Artillery
Includes multiple rocket launchers, medium and heavy mortars, and other weapons mounted on, or towed by, vehicles

Precision guided munitions for land warfare
Primarily anti-tank guided missiles

Land mines
Main discussion of mines here; naval mines cross-reference to this.

Missile Technology
In the early 1960s, President Gamal Abdel Nasser pursued a crash missile production program with German assistance at "Factory 333" in Heliopolis, a few miles east of Cairo. (1) Three rockets were reportedly under development there: the 375-km range al Zafar, the 600-km range al Kahar, and the 1,000-km range al Raid. All three systems were canceled when the West German government put an end to the cooperation in 1966. Egypt is believed to produce the SCUD-B and FROG-7 in its own factories.

Egypt began collaborating with Argentina on the Badr-2000 (which parallels the Argentine Condor II) in 1984. The Badr/Condor was to be an advanced two-stage, solid-fuel, inertially guided ballistic missile, and was described as "state-of-the-art." It was expected to deliver a 700 kg payload over 1,000 km, accurate to within 100 meters. (8) In late September 1989, Assistant Secretary of State John Kelly testified to the House Foreign Affairs Middle East Subcommittee that Egypt had terminated its cooperation with Iraq on the Condor II. (9) He did not explain when or why the Egyptians withdrew from the project.

1988: An Egyptian military officer is arrested in Baltimore for trying to smuggle carbon-carbon materials out of the United States. A California aerospace engineer, Egyptian-born Abdelkader Helmy, one of the defendants in the case, later says that he had been recruited for the scheme by Egypt's defense minister, General Abdel Halim Abu Ghazala. However, this move followed Egyptian embarrassment over the attempted smuggling, in June 1988, of 200 kg of carbon-carbon material, which is used as a protective coating for ballistic missile warheads. The Egyptian defense minister at the time, Abdel Halim Abu Ghazala, was implicated in the scandal, and was fired in April 1989.

Although the Condor II cancellation was a severe set-back to the Egyptian missile program, the collaboration did enhance indigenous capabilities - as did North Korean and other assistance - and provided considerable missile-related technology that undoubtedly has been applied to the Scud improvement program. Concerning missile proliferation, Egypt, though not a member of the MTCR, does not appear to be exploiting its presumed missile production capacity to market these weapons. Resource constraints may be one explanation for Egypt's modest missile capabilities. Another may be that its missile force has been developed only to the level needed to maintain status as a leader among the Arab states and a negotiator with the West. As the recipient of two billions dollars of U.S. aid annually, Egypt has good reason to choose diplomatic pressure, rather than arming Israel's enemies, to get Israel to sign the NPT as part of the Middle East peace process. Its continuing diplomatic efforts bear this out.

Chemical Weapons
In December 2002, Iraq's 1,200 page Weapons Declaration revealed a list of Eastern and Western corporations and countries—as well as individuals—that exported chemical and biological materials to Iraq in the past two decades. By far, the largest suppliers of precursors for chemical weapons production were Egypt (2,400 tons)

Egypt, in a civil war with Yemen between 1963 and 1967, used chemical weapons om(tear gas, phosgene and mustard agents).1989: At the Chemical Weapons Conference in Paris, Egypt defends the right of Arab countries to produce chemical weapons as a counterbalance to Israel's nuclear weapons.

1989: U.S. officials say Egypt is buying thionyl chloride, a chemical weapon precursor, from companies in India.

"Egypt's Abu Zaabal Special Chemicals Co., a state-owned conglomerate with artillery and ammunition plants run by the Egyptian Ministry for Military Production. While Abu Zaabal's involvement in Iraq's programs was revealed during the Scott commission inquiry in Britain in 1993, the quantities of nerve-gas precursors delivered by Abu Zaabal, as declared by Iraq, is a mind-boggling 1,300 tons in all. The Iraqis also state that Abu Zaabal delivered 200 tons of hydrogen cyanide, a CW agent in its own right. Iraq used cyanide agents in 1988, four years after this Egyptian delivery, when it gassed thousands of Kurds in the town of Halabja.

"In 1989, when the New York Times accused Egypt of transforming Abu Zaabal into a CW production plant with the help of a Swiss company, President Hosni Mubarak hotly denied the charge. The Iraqi documents INSIGHT has obtained show that Abu Zaabal already was producing chemical weapons and precursor chemicals at least five years earlier. Abu Zaabal is located in the Cairo suburb of Heliopolis and is known in Egypt as Factory 18, a carryover from the days of Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser, when all military plants were known by number and not by name.

"Egypt was the first country after World War II to use chemical weapons, against rebels in Yemen, so we've known they've had a chemical-weapons capability for some time," says Shoshana Bryen of the Jewish Institute for National Security, a Washington think tank. "These undeclared sales to Iraq raise serious questions about Egypt's trustworthiness as a U.S. ally," she says.</ref