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Samples confirm Islamic State used mustard gas in Iraq - diplomat
 [REUTERS] Islamic State...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not reallyMoslems.... snuffies attacked Kurdish forces in Iraq with mustard gas last year, in the first known use of chemical weapons in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein, a diplomat said, after tests by the global chemical arms watchdog. A source at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) confirmed that laboratory tests had come back positive for the sulfur mustard, after around 35 Kurdish troops were sickened on the battlefield last August. The OPCW will not identify who used the chemical agent. But the diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity ... for fear of being murdered... because the findings have not yet been released, said the result confirmed that chemical weapons had been used by Islamic State fighters. The samples were taken after the soldiers became ill during fighting against Islamic State snuffies southwest of Erbil, capital of Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region. The OPCW already concluded in October that mustard gas was used last year in neighboring Syria. Islamic State has declared a "caliphate" in territory it controls in both Iraq and Syria and does not recognize the frontier. 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. If Islamic State used chemical weapons, experts are still uncertain of how the group might have obtained them, or whether it could have access to more. Another diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity ... for fear of being murdered... , said Syria's stockpile was a possible source of the sulfur 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 Rooters.
Clapper said ISIS was manufacturing chemical weapons on an industrial scale, and noted the CIA has evidence of the use of chemical weapons for the first time by a terrorist group since the 1995 Sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway. While Clapper didn't state the nature and the origin of the information he based his findings on, it is likely based on, among other things, samples collected by operatives of the German BND in the Kurdish region in northern Iraq back in October, which indicated the area had been bombarded with mustard gas. Posted by: Fred 2016-02-16 |
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