Rihab Taha
A 1999 report commissioned by the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) named her as one of the world's most dangerous women.
[2] Rihab Rashida Taha ranks among the most important of a new breed of Third World weapons designers who were highly nationalistic, western-educated and willing to violate any international norms or scientific ethics.
[3] Taha first rose to prominence in the Western media after being named in a 2003 British intelligence dossier, released to the public by the Prime Minister Tony Blair, on Iraq's biological, chemical and nuclear capability.
[4] It was this dossier that triggered the chain of events that led to the suicide of British UN weapons inspector David Kelly, who was accused of telling a BBC reporter that some of the intelligence had been manipulated.
[6] Taha is married to the British-educated General Amer Mohammad Rashid, the former Iraqi oil minister and director of Iraq's Military Industrial Corporation, which was responsible for Saddam's advanced weapons programs.
Taha met General Rashid, who has a Ph.D in engineering from the University of Birmingham, when they were both invited to New York City for a meeting with the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) in 1993.
In 1985, she worked in the al-Muthanna chemical plant near Baghdad, and later became chief production officer in al-Hakam (also spelled al-Hakum), Iraq's top-secret biological-warfare facility at the time.
"There were a few things that were peculiar about this animal-feed production plant," Charles Duelfer, UNSCOM's deputy executive chairman, later told reporters, "beginning with the extensive air defenses surrounding it."
According to the 1999 DIA report, the normally mild-mannered Taha exploded into violent rages when questioned about al-Hakam, shouting, screaming and, storming out of the room, before returning and smashing a chair.
It was because of the discovery of Taha's work with camel pox that the U.S. and British intelligence services feared Saddam Hussein may have been planning to weaponize the smallpox virus.
"[12] On 18 September 2004, the Tawhid and Jihad ("Oneness of God and Holy War") Islamist group, led by Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, kidnapped Americans Eugene Armstrong and Jack Hensley, and British engineer Kenneth Bigley, threatening to kill them if Iraqi women prisoners were not released.
The only Iraqi women prisoners being held at that time, according to the British government, were Taha and another woman scientist, Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash, a bio-tech researcher who was on the U.S. list of the 55 most wanted members of Saddam's regime.
He said the decision was not related to Zarqawi's demands, but that the government regularly reviews the cases of prominent detainees, and it was decided to release Taha because she had cooperated with the authorities.
[14] Another female scientist, Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash, nicknamed "Mrs. Anthrax" by the U.S., was also among those released after what the U.S. said was a standardized process of review and an agreement with the interim Iraqi government.
