A member of Al Ansar with foreign journalists

LONDON, February 9 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) – A ‘poison factory’ which was declared by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell during his speech to the U.N. February 5, turned out to be no more than a hoax, according to the U.K. newspaper, the Observer.

In its Sunday, February 9 edition, the Observer said that the “terrorist camp” in northern Iraq is no more than a “shabby military compound”, a “dilapidated collection of concrete outbuildings at the foot of a grassy sloping hill.”

Luke Harding, the Observer’s correspondent was one of many foreign correspondents who was invited to the  compound by the Ansar al Islam, Islamic group.

“If Colin Powell were to visit the shabby military compound at the foot of a large snow-covered mountain, he might be in for an unpleasant surprise,” Harding said in his report.

“Behind the barbed wire, and a courtyard strewn with broken rocket parts, are a few empty concrete houses. There is a bakery. There is no sign of chemical weapons anywhere - only the smell of paraffin and vegetable ghee used for cooking.

“In the kitchen, I discovered some chopped up tomatoes but not much else. The cook had left his Kalashnikov propped neatly against the wall,” he said, the paper reported.

“We are just a group of Muslims trying to do our duty,” Mohammad Hasan, spokesman for Ansar al-Islam, explained. “We don’t have any drugs for our fighters. We don’t even have any aspirin. How can we produce any chemicals or weapons of mass destruction?” he asked, the Observer reported.

Journalists, Harding said, have never been invited to this area. But, he predicted, this attempt of preventing an American missile strike will most certainly fail.

The group is at war with the Kurdish secular parties who control the rest of the area, the paper reported.

On Wednesday, February 5, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell presented a much-anticipated report on Iraq to the Security Council, but no clear-cut evidence was available in the passionate hour-long presentation, that included vague “intercepted” phone calls, space images and video-clips.

Trying to conclude that Iraq was in “material breach” of U.N. disarmament demands, Powell warned the world body that it risked irrelevance if it did not now consider the “serious consequences” contemplated for noncompliance, AFP reported.

“Iraq has now placed itself in danger of the serious consequences called for in U.N. Resolution 1441,” he told a special meeting of the U.N. Security Council.

“And this body places itself in danger of irrelevance if it allows Iraq to continue to defy its will without responding effectively and immediately,” Powell said.

“The issue before us is not how much time we are willing to give the inspectors to be frustrated by Iraqi obstruction,” he said. “How much longer are we willing to put up with Iraq’s noncompliance before we, as a council, we, as the United Nations, say: ‘Enough is enough.’”

“The gravity of this moment is matched by the gravity of the threat that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction pose to the world,” he added.

Powell also showed pictures of what he said was a ballistic missile facility two days before the inspectors arrived, with vehicles outside including a crane for moving missiles.

Powell presented a satellite image of a weapons munitions facility, which is known to have held chemical weapons.

Powell said orders had been given by the Iraqi authorities to hide all communications with the government body in charge of its weapons program.

He also alleged that senior members of the Iraqi regime had hidden wanted documents in their homes and put material in cars and driven them around the country to avoid detection.