The samples were taken after the soldiers became ill during fighting
against Islamic State militants southwest of Erbil, capital of Iraq's
autonomous Kurdish region.
Samples confirm Islamic State used mustard gas in Iraq -diplomat(Times Of Israel)
Islamic State militants attacked Kurdish forces in Iraq with mustard gas last year, the first known use of chemical weapons in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein, a diplomat said, based on tests by the global chemical weapons watchdog.
A
source at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons
(OPCW) confirmed that laboratory tests had come back positive for the
sulphur 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 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 militants
southwest of Erbil, capital of Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region.
The
OPCW already concluded in October that mustard gas was used last year
in neighbouring Syria. Islamic State has declared a "caliphate" in
territory it controls in both Iraq and Syria and does not recognise the
frontier.
Experts believe that the sulphur mustard either originated from an undeclared Syrian
chemical stockpile, or that militants have gained the basic know how to
develop and conduct a crude chemical attack with rockets or mortars.
Iraq's chemical arsenal was mainly destroyed in the Saddam era, although U.S. troops encountered some old Saddam-era chemical munitions during the 2003-2011 U.S. occupation.
Syria
gave up its own chemical weapons, including stockpiles of sulphur
mustard, under international supervision after hundreds of civilians
were killed with sarin nerve gas in a Damascus suburb in 2013, an attack
Western countries blame on President Bashar al-Assad's government, which denies it.
Sulphur
mustard is a Class 1 chemical agent, which means it has very few uses
outside chemical warfare. Used with lethal effectiveness in World War
One, it causes severe delayed burns to the eyes, skin and respiratory
tract.
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