ISISISIS employed crude chemical weapons against Kurdish peshmerga

Kurdish sources in Iraq have said they have evidence that Islamic State (ISIS) used chlorine gas as a chemical weapon against Kurdish peshmerga fighters.

The Kurdistan Region Security Council said the chlorine gas was spread by a suicide truck bomb attack on 23 January in northern Iraq. Iraqi officials and Kurds fighting in Syria have made several similar allegations since last fall about ISIS using chlorine chemical weapons against them.

In a statement, the Kurdish council said the attack took place on a road between Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, and the Syrian border, where peshmerga forces were fighting to re-take a supply line used by ISIS militants. Kurdish sources said that Kurdish fighters found “around twenty gas canisters” which had been loaded onto the truck involved in the attack.

The Guardian reports that the Kurdish council provided a video showing a truck racing down a road, white smoke pouring out of it as it came under heavy fire from peshmerga fighters. It later showed a white, billowing cloud after the truck exploded and the remnants of it scattered across a road.

An official with the Kurdish council told AP that dozens of peshmerga fighters were treated for “dizziness, nausea, vomiting and general weakness” after the attack.

The Kurds say that a lab, which was not named, analyzed samples of clothing and soil from the site, and found chlorine traces.

“The fact Isis relies on such tactics demonstrates it has lost the initiative and is resorting to desperate measures,” the Kurdish government told the Guardian.

The Kurdish claims were not confirmed by independent sources. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which has overseen Syria dismantling its chemical arms stockpile, is yet to comment on the Kurdish allegations.

Chlorine is an industrial chemical which was first employed as a chemical weapon at Ypres in the First World War with devastating results, because gas masks were not widely available at the time (Adolf Hitler lost his eye-sight for three weeks, and had to be hospitalized, as a result of a French chlorine attack on his unit).

Chlorine has many industrial and public uses – for example, in water purification – but when used as a weapon, its victims choke to death, and those who do not die suffer from a range of debilitating symptoms.

In August 2013 the Assad forces used chlorine gas to attack pro-rebels neighborhoods on the outskirts of Damascus. The attack, in which about 1,200 civilians were killed, almost led to a retaliatory attack by the United States.

Not only the Kurds, but Iraqi forces, too, have alleged that ISIS forces were employing chlorine in some of their attacks. Last September the Iraqi government accused ISIS of using chlorine during clashes in the towns of Balad and Duluiya.

In the previous Islamist insurgency in Iraq – in Anbar province, in 2006-2007 – there was evidence of chemical use by the insurgents. In May 2007 suicide bombers driving chlorine tankers struck three cities in Anbar province, killing two police officers and forcing about 350 Iraqi civilians and six U.S. soldiers to seek treatment for gas exposure.

The insurgents in 2006-2007 were members of al-Qaeda in Iraq, which later transformed itself into ISIS.