ISIL fighters may have used chemical weapons in Iraq, says US

The organizations said they had also documented two such attacks against Kurdish fighters from the People’s Protection Units in Syria’s northeastern Hasakeh province on June 28. But the Peshmerga official said the weapons were made of chlorine.

Officials stress the amount of chemical agent is thought to be small and the concentration low. U.S. officials are concerned, but this is not considered to be a massive attack.

Germany’s Federal Ministry of Defence confirmed Iraqi and US experts were heading to the scene of the attack to investigate.

A Peshmerga officer, Brig. The chemical can be dispersed with artillery shells or rockets.

He said Peshmerga forces in the area were instructed to use gas masks in case of mortar attacks until results are verified in the laboratory. The substance has not yet been tested, though samples have been given to coalition members, Barzani said. The ISIS which has often boasted about enhanced weapons in its possession is believed to have used Mustard Gas against the Iraqi Kurd fighters last week.

Barzani said that emphasized that encountering such a substance so far from Irbil “is very risky”, and he said there was an urgent need for protective gear.

Islamic State’s battlefield success has become an issue in the U.S. presidential campaign.

U.S. agencies have believed that the Islamic State aspired to obtain chemical weapons, such as mustard gas, but officials said it was premature to immediately connect the three attacks because the agents involved in the Iraq incidents were still in the process of being analyzed.

An official told CNN on Friday that initial testing seemed to show the agent used on the attack in Syria was a precursor and thus had likely not come from a leftover stockpile belonging to the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

If it is found to be mustard gas, the biggest question is how Islamic State got it.

They noted that there are many kinds of blistering agents that cause similar skin reactions to those seen in the attack. “We think they did”. “As I sit here today, we do not have confirmation, No. 1, that it was mustard and, No. 2, that somebody used it”.

Now U.S. officials are focused on figuring out exactly what happened in the attack, and if mustard gas was used, how the terrorist group obtained it.

In fact in the year 1993, it was due to the use of this gas in the civil war in Syria the chemical substance had been banned.