Dr. Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash (born Baghdad 1953) is an American-educated Iraqi scientist, called Mrs. Anthrax by the U.S. government. Ammash was number 53 on the Pentagon's list of the 55 most wanted, the five of hearts in the deck of Most wanted Iraqi playing cards, and the only woman to be featured. She surrendered to coalition forces on May 9, 2003 and is one of two Iraqi women known to be in U.S. custody at the time of writing (January 2005). The other is the British-educated Dr. Rihab Rashid Taha, who led Saddam Hussein's biological warfare program until 1995. Neither woman has been charged with any offense.
U.S. officials allege that Ammash, who earned a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of Missouri-Columbia, and was appointed to the Revolutionary Command Council in May 2001, helped to rebuild Iraq's germ warfare program in the mid-1990s, after the Gulf War. American officials say she was one of a new generation of leaders named by Saddam to leading posts within the Baath party. In one of several videos of Saddam released during the war, Ammash was the only woman seated around a table with half a dozen men.
Ammash served as president of Iraqi's microbiology society and as dean at the University of Baghdad. U.S. officials said she was trained by Nassir al-Hindawi, described by United Nations inspectors as the "father of Iraq's biological weapons program". Ammash and al-Hindawi are among Iraq's top weapons scientists. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Baghdad, followed by a Masters in microbiology from Texas Woman's University in Denton, Texas. She spent four years at the University of Missouri-Columbia in pursuit of her doctorate in microbiology, which she received in December 1983, for a thesis on the toxicity of radiation, paraquat and adrimycin, a chemotherapy drug, to bacteria and mammals.
She conducted research into the condition of the Iraqi victims of illnesses that may have been caused by depleted uranium from shells used in the 1991 Gulf War, [1] (http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/ABDCF59C-1951-43B0-92AE-220BFFC052E0.htm) and had published several papers on the health effects of the war and the subsequent sanctions. [2] (http://www.counterpunch.org/spinoza05082003.html)
Ammash's father was a high-level Baath Party member in Iraq, who became defense minister in 1963, deputy prime minister in 1968, and an ambassador in 1977. He is believed to have been ordered killed by Saddam Hussein.
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