The U.S. Marines assigned to guard Saddam Hussein's production facility for weapons of mass destruction in northwest Iraq said the Islamic State may have gained access to the cache of chemical and biological weapons stored in one of its bunkers.

In a report published by Paul Ester for Fox News on Saturday, the soldiers who guarded over an off-limits bunker in the northern area of the Muthanna State Establishment said it housed the deadliest weapons of mass destruction known to man.

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Former U.S. Marine Lt. Joshua Hartley said The Dragon's Egg, the name the marines gave the mysterious bunker, was where Hussein's scientists developed and produced lethal weapons like Sarin nerve gas, mustard munitions, Tabun, and VX gases from 1983 to 1990.

These were intended for attacks against Iranian and Kurdish forces during the Iran-Iraq war of the 80s.

Consistent with the investigative report published by The New York Times earlier this week, the soldiers expressed fear that the notorious Islamic State group had looted the facility and now possesses whatever weapons left stored there.

The newspaper reported that 2,500 chemical munitions, shells and warheads were still buried in Muthanna when the jihadists overrun the facility earlier this year.

The facility was under U.S. control during the years following the invasion of Iraq, but was later handed over to the Iraqi government to oversee its care.

In June, the Iraqi government wrote a letter to the United Nations saying the Islamist group has captured the facility.

Hartley told Fox News there were two top-secret bunkers in the Muthanna complex that contained potentially devastating nerve agents. The other was sealed before he was deployed to the Iraqi Army outpost in 2008.

He indicated that given the dangers posed by the weapons contained in bunkers 13 and 41 these should have been decommissioned. But this does not seem to be the case as recent reports revealed that the Islamist group used chemical weapons during their first wave of attacks against Kobani in July. 

TagsSaddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, weapons of mass destruction, chemical weapons, biological weapons