BAGHDAD, Aug. 13 -- U.S. troops raiding a warehouse in the northern city of Mosul uncovered a suspected chemical-weapons factory containing 1,500 gallons of chemicals believed destined for attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces and civilians, military officials said Saturday.

Monday's early morning raid found 11 precursor agents, "some of them quite dangerous by themselves," a military spokesman, Lt. Col. Steven A. Boylan, said in Baghdad.

Combined, the chemicals would yield an agent capable of "lingering hazards" for those exposed to it, Boylan said. The likely targets would have been "coalition and Iraqi security forces, and Iraqi civilians," in part owing to the difficulty anyone deploying the chemicals would have had in keeping the agents from spreading out over a wide area, he said.

Military officials did not immediately identify either the precursors or the agent they could have produced. "We don't want to speculate on any possibilities until our analysis is complete," Col. Henry Franke, a nuclear, biological and chemical defense officer, was quoted as saying in a military statement.

Investigators still were trying to determine which group was responsible for the alleged lab and whether the expertise came from foreign fighters or members of Saddam Hussein's former security apparatus, the military said.

"They're looking into it," Boylan said. "They've got to go through it -- there's a lot of stuff there."

This is a post-invasion facility, so no connection to Saddam's regime.

The most important question here, as far as I'm concerned, is: "Where did the chemicals come from?" I'm assuming they probably weren't from a source in Iraq as such a source would probably have been found out by now.

I'm putting my money on Iran, but Syria would be a good guess as well.