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Tuesday 16 Feb 2016 - 13:25 Makkah mean time-7-5-1437
(Getty Images)
Erbil, Iraq (IINA) - Tests by the global chemical arms watchdog showed that ISIS militants attacked Kurdish forces in Iraq with mustard gas in 2015, marking the first known use of chemical weapons in the country since the fall of Saddam Hussein, The Guardian reported.
A source at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) told the Reuters news agency that laboratory tests had come back positive for the sulphur mustard after around 35 Kurdish troops were sickened on the battlefield in August 2015.
The OPCW would not identify who used the chemical agent. However, the diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity because the findings had not yet been released, said the result confirmed that chemical weapons had been used by ISIS fighters.
The samples were taken after the soldiers became ill during fighting against ISIS militants south-west of Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region.
The matter is expected to be raised at the next meeting of the OPCW’s 41-member executive council in a month, an official said.
Experts were uncertain of how the group might have obtained chemical weapons or whether it had access to more.
Another diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Syria’s stockpile was a possible source of the sulphur mustard used in Iraq. That would mean Damascus had failed to fully disclose its chemical weapons program, which was dismantled under international supervision in 2013-2014, the diplomat said.
“If Syria has indeed given up its chemical weapons to the international community, it is only the part that has been declared to the OPCW and the declaration was obviously incomplete,” the diplomat told Reuters.
Syrian officials have previously denied any part of the country’s former stockpile remains undestroyed.
Syria agreed to give up its chemical weapons stockpile after hundreds of people died in an attack with Sarin nerve gas in a Damascus suburb in 2013. Western countries blame that attack on the government of Bashar al-Assad.
Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a specialist in biological and chemical warfare, said ISIS fighters may have developed their own chemical weapons capability and could be preparing to use it again.
“I’m pretty convinced that the mustard ISIS are using in Iraq is made by them in Mosul,” he said, referring to the main city in northern Iraq, which ISIS fighters have occupied since 2014. “They have all the precursors at hand from the oil industry and all the experts at hand to do it.”
Sulphur mustard is a class 1 chemical agent, which means it has very few uses outside chemical warfare. Used with lethal effectiveness in the first world war, it causes severe delayed burns to the eyes, skin and respiratory tract.
AG/IINA
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