Rihab Taha

Rihab Rashid Taha al-Azawi (born November 12, 1957) is an Iraqi microbiologist, dubbed Dr. Germ by United Nations weapons inspectors, who worked in Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program. 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. Dr Taha admitted producing germ warfare agents but said they had been destroyed.

Dr. 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. Taha worked hard to contribute to Iraqi weapons program although she was not a gifted student as Dr. John Turner, the head of the university’s biology department in England, recalls. As a result of Taha’s hard work she became known as the mother of all third world biological weapons programs. It was Taha who sold the idea of an Iraqi biological weapons program to Saddam Hussein and was given an award for her work in biological weapons, specifically the development of anthrax and botulinum weapons by Saddam Hussein. Moreover, she has been held up as an example to Iraqi women interested in science.

Taha first rose to prominence in the Western media after being named in a 2003 British intelligence dossier, released to the public by Prime Minister Tony Blair, on Iraq's biological, chemical and nuclear capability. The dossier alleged that Taha had played a leading role in the manufacture of anthrax and other biological agents. It was this dossier that triggered the chain of events that led to the death of British UN weapons inspector David Kelly, who was accused of telling a BBC reporter that some of the intelligence had been manipulated. Dr. Kelly, as an UNSCOM weapons inspector visiting Iraq on the occasions described below, had interrogated Dr. Taha so pitilessly that she was "reduced to tears" (ref. Norman Baker "The Strange Death of David Kelly", 2007).

Born in 1957, and a graduate of the University of Baghdad, Taha received her Ph.D in plant toxins from the University of East Anglia's School of Biological Sciences in Norwich, England, which she attended from 1980 to 1984. She published two articles on her research, co-authored by her supervisor Professor John Turner, once the head of the School of Biological Sciences. In 1984, "Contribution of tabtoxin to the pathogenicity of Pseudomonas syringae pv. tabac" was published in Physiological Plant Pathology (25, 55-69) and "Effect of tabtoxin on nitrogen metabolism" by J.G. Turner, R.R. Taha & J.M. Debbage was published in Physiologia Plantarum in 1986 (67, 649-653).

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