UNSCOM was a United Nations body created in 1991, right after the Gulf War, with one job: to find Iraq's chemical and biological weapons and long-range missiles, destroy them, and then keep checking that they had not been rebuilt. Its inspectors travelled around Iraq for most of the 1990s opening factories and bunkers, and the arguments over where they were allowed to go were front-page news for years. The work ended in 1998 when inspectors withdrew, and the UN formally replaced UNSCOM with a new body, UNMOVIC, at the end of 1999. Learners meet this word only in one place: news writing and history books about Iraq, the UN and the 2003 war. It is not a general word and you never need to produce it yourself. What is worth carrying away is the shape of it. UNSCOM is an acronym — United Nations Special Commission — and English news is full of these UN-something names, so recognising the pattern is more useful than remembering this one organisation. It is written UNSCOM in capitals in most sources; some dictionaries print Unscom. Say it as one word, roughly "UN-skom."

聯合國特別委員會（UNSCOM）——波灣戰爭後成立、負責查核銷毀伊拉克大規模毀滅性武器的聯合國機構