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What happens when terrorists get their hands on weapons of mass destruction? They will use them, and that also includes marauding armies of terrorists like ISIS. Despite the risks associated with using old chemical ordnance, risks that the West hoped would dissuade ISIS from making use of battlefield discoveries of old stock, the Washington Post reports confirmation that the terrorist army has deployed chlorine-gas weapons on at least one occasion against the Iraqi army: Dizzy, vomiting and struggling to breathe, 11 Iraqi police officers were rushed to a government hospital 50 miles north of the capital last month. The...

NEWPORT, Ind. (AP) - Army contractors halted operations Saturday at a western Indiana complex built to destroy a deadly nerve agent after nearly 500 gallons of caustic wastewater spilled in a contained area. No workers were injured or exposed to the hydrolysate, a byproduct of the destruction of the agent, when it leaked onto the floor of a sealed area at the Newport Chemical Depot, depot spokesman Dennis Lindsey said. The facility was to be shut down until the spill was cleaned up and its cause determined, Lindsey said. The western Indiana facility destroys the Cold War-era chemical weapon VX...

Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts. Most significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the US intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country’s civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN study concluded – without assessing responsibility – had been used in the rocket attack. In the...

A truck carrying gas exploded near a restaurant just north of Baghdad on Tuesday, killing five people and injuring over a hundred, including many women and children poisoned by gas released in the blast, police said. They initially said the truck was carrying liquid natural gas but later said it was chlorine gas. Five people were killed by the blast and around 138 hurt, many of them poisoned by the gas being transported on the truck, police said.

The Left would rather forget its old slogan, “Bush lied, thousands died.” The very mention of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and Iraq was toxic for Republicans by 2005. They wanted to forget about the supposed absence of recently manufactured WMD in great quantities in Iraq; Democrats saw Republican defensiveness as key to their recovery in 2006. By the time Obama was elected, the issue had been demagogued to death, was no longer of any political utility, and so vanished. So why all of a sudden is the New York Times strangely focused on old WMD stockpiles showing up in...

Deadly chemicals are found dumped in river By David Harrison in Nasiriyah (Filed: 06/04/2003) Mustard gas and cyanide have been found in river water in the Iraqi city of Nasiriyah, coalition forces said yesterday. The poisonous substances are believed to have been dumped in the Euphrates either by Iraqi soldiers fleeing from American troops or local factories that produced weapons of mass destruction. A spokesman for the United States marines, based just outside the city, described the quantities of chemical agents found as "significant" and claimed that it was further evidence that Saddam Hussein has produced weapons of mass destruction....

Two chemical weapons-related stories this week should be considered separate, not necessarily interchangeable, parts of a whole. The first was that ISIS had used chemical weapons against Kurdish forces in Kobani, raising the question of where ISIS would have acquired such weapons.  The second, in the New York Times, detailed how U.S. forces in Iraq uncovered thousands of shells filled with chemical munitions from various areas of the country following the invasion, and how they were stored and guarded until 2011. Those disinclined to support the Iraq War, including the Times, International Business Times, and Huffington Post, posit that the...

The New York Times reports that for more than a decade, American forces discovered and in several cases were injured by Chemical Weapons that were hidden or abandoned in Iraq years earlier. These Unmarked chemical weapons had been intermixed with conventional weapons in order to hide them from weapon inspectors. Not knowing the true nature of the unmarked ordnance made them an additional hazard, both as improvised explosive devices (IED) and for the explosive ordinance devices (EOD), to the personal sent to neutralize them. Secrecy Since the beginning of Iraqi Freedom, allied encounters with chemical weapons were kept secret and...

The U.S. Marines who guarded the sprawling complex in northwest Iraq where Saddam Hussein’s 1980s war machine churned out some of the most deadly chemical and biological weapons known to man had a name for one especially mysterious bunker: The Dragon’s Egg.

FAS | Nuke | Guide | Iraq | CW |||| Index | Search | Join FAS Chemical Weapons Programs Iraq started research into the production of chemical weapons agents in the 1970s and started batch production of agents in the early 1980s. At that stage, production was heavily reliant on the import of precursor chemicals from foreign suppliers. In 1982, early in the Iran-Iraq War, the Iraqis used riot control agents to repel Iranian attacks. They progressed to the use of CW agents in mid-1983 with mustard, and in March 1984 with tabun (the first use ever of a nerve...

<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>