Iraqi Kurdish authorities said on Saturday (March 14) they have evidence that Islamic State had used chlorine gas as a chemical weapon against their peshmerga fighters.
The Security Council of the semi-autonomous Kurdish region (KRSC) said in a statement that the peshmerga had taken soil and clothing samples after an Islamic State suicide bombing in northern Iraq in January.
It said laboratory analysis showed “the samples contained levels of chlorine that suggested the substance was used in weaponised form.”
The Kurdish authorities said in their statement they had “long suspected that (IS) fighters have been using chemical agents” and cited video footage from battles around the city of Tikrit between the militants and Iraqi troops and allied Shi’ite militias where “plumes of orange smoke” were visible.
Reuters was also given video footage of what the Kurdish Security Council identified as being from a January 23 attack.
Among the images were several of canisters lying on the ground that the security council says were found at the site and contained chlorine.
Chlorine is a choking agent whose use as a chemical weapon dates back to World War One.
It is banned under the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention, which prohibits all use of toxic agents on the battlefield.
The Kurdish allegation could not be independently confirmed.
Chlorine has been used “systematically” in the civil war in neighbouring Syria, anOrganisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) fact-finding mission found last year.
The OPCW would have to get its own samples to confirm the use of chemical weapons in a member state.
The Kurdish statement said the January 23 suicide car bombing by Islamic State took place on a highway between Mosul and the Syrian border.
A Kurdish security source said that the peshmerga fired a rocket at the car carrying the bomb so there were no casualties from the incident except for the suicide bomber.
About a dozen peshmerga fighters experienced symptoms of nausea, vomiting,dizziness or weakness, the source said.
The statement said the analysis was carried out in a European Union-certified laboratory after the soil and samples were sent by the Kurdish Regional Government to a “partner nation” in the U.S.-led coalition that is fighting Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria.
The source described the samples as “leftovers from the suicide bomber”, but declined to identify the laboratory.
Iraq’s Kurds were the victims of the deadliest chemical attack of modern times when Saddam Hussein’s air force bombed the town of Halabja in 1988, gassing at least 5,000 people to death.
OPCW spokesman Peter Sawczak said the organisation has not received a request from Iraq to investigate the claims of chemical weapons use.
The U.S. Central Command said on January 30 that an Islamic State chemical weapons expert had been killed in a coalition air strike six days earlier near Mosul- the day after the car bombing cited in Saturday’s statement.
The expert, Abu Malik, had been a chemical weapons engineer during the rule ofSaddam Hussein and then affiliated himself with al Qaeda in Iraq in 2005, Central Command said at the time.
His joining Islamic State gave the insurgent force a chemical weapons capability, it added.
The Pentagon in Washington had no comment on Saturday’s Kurdish statement.
Kurdish forces, backed by U.S.-led air strikes, have taken a prominent role in fighting the Islamic State jihadists who last year declared a cross-border caliphate after seizing land in eastern Syria and northern Iraq.
No international organisation has documented the use of chemical weapons on Iraqi territory in the war with IS.
Reuters
