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<p>Satellite pix show that three chemical facilities in Iraq - Fullujah I, II and III - wrecked in the 1991 Gulf War are back in business.</p> <p>August 19, 2002 -- WASHINGTON - These mysterious chemical factories northwest of Baghdad are a major reason the Bush administration thinks war with Iraq is inevitable.</p>

<p>December 5, 2002 -- U.N. weapons inspectors found mustard gas yesterday inside Iraqi artillery shells at a military complex north of Baghdad.</p> <p>The inspectors had already known the gas and shells were stored at the Muthanna military site but hadn't yet been destroyed when the previous inspection team left Iraq in 1998.</p>

The United States had gone to war declaring it must destroy an active weapons of mass destruction program. Instead, American troops gradually found and ultimately suffered from the remnants of long-abandoned programs, built in close collaboration with the West. The New York Times found 17 American service members and seven Iraqi police officers who were exposed to nerve or mustard agents after 2003. American officials said that the actual tally of exposed troops was slightly higher, but that the government’s official count was classified. The secrecy fit a pattern. Since the outset of the war, the scale of the United...

This story is disturbing on multiple levels. It has been revealed that stockpiles of expired or degraded chemical munitions were discovered in Iraq during the initial years of the war and both American and Iraqi forces were exposed to them in more than twenty instances. This information was never revealed to the public. American troops were exposed to chemical weapons multiple times in the years following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, while the Pentagon kept their discoveries of the expired or degraded weapons secret from investigators, fellow soldiers, and military doctors, according to a published report. The New York...

The New York Times...details U.S. forces in Iraq finding thousands of chemical weapons during the Iraq war. "From 2004 to 2011...troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam Hussein’s rule," "In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads

<p>Disturbing new photos of ethnic Kurds killed by Islamic State fighters are stoking fears the terrorist army may be using chemical weapons seized from Saddam Hussein’s old arsenals, according to a Middle East watchdog.</p> <p>The pictures, obtained by the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA), show the bodies of Syrian Kurds who appear to have been gassed by ISIS in the besieged Kobani region this July. That fighting came just one month after Islamic State forces surged through the once-notorious Muthanna compound in Iraq, the massive base where Hussein began producing chemical weapons in the 1980s, which he used to kill thousands of Kurds in Halabja in northern Iraq in 1988.</p>

A quick update on the largely forgotten half of President Obama’s shambolic Syria policy. You’ll recall, of course, the blown chemical weapons “red line” and the subsequent, humiliating Putin/Assad plan that accidentally became US policy due after John Kerry blundered into it. Kerry has since admitted that the entire proposition has collapsed, forcing the White House to publicly disagree with its own Secretary of State. Nevertheless, a loyal band of administration lackeys triumphantly cheered news of Syria’s alleged disarmament when it broke over the summer, after several missed deadlines. ‘No Drama Obama’ had done it again, they crowed, achieving...

IS has used chlorine gas against Iraqi soldiers News / World IS Militants Kill 300 Iraqi Soldiers with Chlorine Gas 22.09.2014 Shwan BarzinjiBasNews, Erbil Iraqi Member of Parliament Ali al-Bredi has claimed that Islamic State (IS) militants are using Chlorine gas against Iraqi soldiers in Fallujah. In a press conference on Monday, al-Bredi revealed that IS have killed 300 Iraqi soldiers with chlorine gas. He said that the militants deployed the gas in the Siqiliya area located of northern Fallujah, a city in Anbar province, about 70 km from the capital of Iraq, Baghdad. “Responsibility for this lies with...

The destruction of Syria's chemical weapons stockpile has been completed, Barack Obama has said. The US President welcomed the development, but said Washington would seek to ensure Damascus fulfils all its commitments. "Today we mark an important achievement in our ongoing effort to counter the spread of weapons of mass destruction by eliminating Syria's declared chemical weapons stockpile," he said. He added that the destruction, carried out aboard a US Navy ship on the Mediterranean Sea, sent "a clear message that the use of these abhorrent weapons has consequences and will not be tolerated by the international community".

<p>Russia is demanding an investigation into the alleged use of ‘chemical weapons’ against separatists in the east of Ukraine as the two countries agreed to extend their ceasefire.</p> <p>Pro-separatist rebels have claimed that people showing symptoms of chlorine poisoning had been admitted to hospital following an alleged attack carried out by Ukrainian Special Forces near Slavyansk.</p>

Pentagon: Ship Leaves for Italy to Destroy Syrian Chemical Weapons By: Sam LaGrone Published: June 25, 2014 12:48 PM Updated: June 25, 2014 12:52 PM The U.S. ship that was quickly put into service to neutralize Syrian chemical weapons has departed Rota, Spain to take on the arms at an Italian port, Pentagon officials announced on Wednesday. MV Cape Ray (T-AKR-9679) will take on the chemical weapons at Gioia Tauro and neutralize the weapons taken from the regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad as part of a deal — negotiated by the United Nations — that prevented U.S. retaliatory strikes...

AMSTERDAM (AP) — The organization charged with overseeing the destruction of Syria's chemical weapons program says the last of the country's acknowledged stockpile has been handed over. Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons director general Ahmet Uzumcu said Monday the final eight percent of the 1,300-ton stockpile has been loaded onto ships in the Syrian port of Latakia.

Well, here’s some lovely news emerging from the new Iraq. 17.09 Chemical weapons produced at the Al Muthanna facility, which Isis today seized, are believed to have included mustard gas, Sarin, Tabun, and VX. Here is the CIA’s file on the complex. QuoteStockpiles of chemical munitions are still stored there. The most dangerous ones have been declared to the UN and are sealed in bunkers. Although declared, the bunkers contents have yet to be confirmed. These areas of the compound pose a hazard to civilians and potential blackmarketers. Numerous bunkers, including eleven cruciform shaped bunkers were exploited. Some of the...

With all eyes firmly focused on what really matters (the oil refineries), The Telegraph reports that ISIS has over-run a Saddam Hussein-era chemical weapons (CW) complex. The al-Muhanna 'mega-facility', about 60 miles south of Baghdad, gives the jihadists access to disused stores of hundreds of tonnes of potentially deadly poisons including mustard gas and sarin. The US state department is 'concerned' but "do not believe that the complex contains CW materials of military value." However, as a former commander of Britain's chemical weapons regiment warned, "we have seen that ISIS has used chemicals in explosions in Iraq before and has...

Sunni extremists in Iraq have occupied what was once Saddam Hussein's premier chemical-weapons production facility, a complex that still contains a stockpile of old weapons, State Department and other U.S. government officials said. U.S. officials don't believe the Sunni militants will be able to create a functional chemical weapon from the material. The weapons stockpiled at the Al Muthanna complex are old, contaminated and hard to move, officials said. Nonetheless, the capture of the chemical-weapon stockpile by the forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, known as ISIS or ISIL, the militant group that is seizing territory in...

Washington—Sunni extremists in Iraq have occupied what was once Saddam Hussein's premier chemical-weapons production facility, a complex that still contains a stockpile of old weapons, State Department and other U.S. government officials said. U.S. officials don't believe the Sunni militants will be able to create a functional chemical weapon from the material. The weapons stockpiled at the Al Muthanna complex are old, contaminated...

16.52 The remaining chemical weapons from Saddam Hussein's regime are stored in two sealed bunkers, both located at the Al Muthanna Chemicals Weapons Complex, a large site in the western desert some 80km north west of Baghdad. This was the principal manufacturing plant for both chemical agents and munitions during Saddam Hussein’s rule. Thousands of tonnes of chemical weapons were produced, stored and deployed by the Saddam Hussein regime. Iraq used these weapons during the Iran - Iraq War (1980 to 1988) and against the Kurds in Halabja in 1988.

Reports that Iran is sending chlorine bombs to Syria have prompted lawmakers to criticize the Obama administration for ignoring Iran’s non-nuclear efforts to foster terrorism and discord across the Middle East. Western intelligence officials suspect that Iran has been sending Chinese-made chlorine gas to Syria in a bid to bolster President Bashar al-Assad’s war against opposition forces. Iran reportedly has some 10,000 canisters of the deadly gas and has been shipping them by plane to Syria, according to the Telegraph. Human rights groups and Syrian opposition leaders have said there is “strong evidence” that Assad has already used the chlorine...

Concerns are growing among Western intelligence services that Syria still has a significant and undeclared arsenal of chemical weapons, including crude chlorine-filled bombs, secret stockpiles of sophisticated nerve gasses or their components—and the scientific know-how to rebuild a larger-scale, higher-grade chemical weapons effort once the Bashar al-Assad regime has escaped the international spotlight. “A ghost of CW [chemical weapons] program in a place riven with conflict—that’s a real concern,” one American intelligence official tells The Daily Beast. But it’s not the only worry. Within the U.S. intelligence community, there’s also lingering unease about the Assad regime’s biological weapons program that...

The household cleaning agent chlorine, in heavy concentration is purchased by Iran and and fitted with detonators, to provide President Bashar Assad with a vehicle for cheating on his undertaking to surrender Syria’s chemical arsenal under the year-old US-Russian chemical disarmament accord. And Assad is indeed getting away with using chlorine bombs, with crippling effect, especially on children, every few days. On April 7, Israel Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon offered chapter and verse to prove that the Syrian army had perpetrated a chemical attack on civilians in he town of Harasta on March 27, causing scores of serious injuries and...