On this day, Iraqi forces deliberately impeded United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) inspection teams, refusing initial access to five designated inspection sites.
The inspectors were ultimately allowed entry after significant delays ranging up to seventeen hours, highlighting ongoing tensions between Iraq and international monitoring efforts in the aftermath of the Gulf War.
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Because Iraq had a history of using chemical weapons, and giving up its weapons of mass destruction was a requirement of the U.N. Security Council resolutions that marked the end of the 1991 Gulf War.
Iraq initially promised to cooperate with the U.N. Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM), and the United Nations expected that disarmament would proceed smoothly and wrap up quickly.
Instead, Iraq watchers say, Iraq undermined and circumvented inspections from the beginning and continued to develop weapons of mass destruction. The inspectors were withdrawn in 1998.
The U.N. Security Council replaced UNSCOM with the United Nations Monitoring, Verification, and Inspections Commission (UNMOVIC) the following year, and inspectors from that agency and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) returned to Iraq in November 2002.