The search is officially over. The group in charge of searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has left the country and returned home to the U.S.

CIA special advisor Charles Duelfer who was appointed by President George W. Bush to head the Iraq Survey Group in an effort to search for Iraqi WMDs reported in September 2004 that Iraq did not have stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons. He added that Iraq's nuclear program had been non-existant since 1991.

Duelfer was quoted as saying in October, "despite Saddam's expressed desire to retain the knowledge of his nuclear team, and his attempts to retain some key parts of the programme after 1991, during the course of the following 12 years Iraq's ability to produce a weapon decayed".

The Iraq Survey Group officially ended its assignment in late December. Their final report stated that there was nothing to report.

The White House had been unwilling to abandon the hunt and insisted that Saddam Hussein did possess WMDs but either shipped them out of Iraq before the war or hid them well within the country.

Bush maintained that he was "right to take action" in Iraq and insisted that Saddam's weapons of mass destruction was the main reason for the U.S. military action.