US, Iraq: ISIS determined to produce chemical weapons

A European intelligence official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, believes that, if ISIS has produced any chemical weapons at all, it’s been a small amount of low-quality mustard gas.

The French army’s medical services sent out stocks of the drug, atropine, under a decree issued on November 14, the day after the attacks, which killed 129 people.

They are also anxious that the extremists are plotting to poison our water supplies.

“We must not rule anything out”.

In a recent report, the United Nations and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) confirmed the use of sulfur mustard near Syria’s northwestern city of Aleppo in August this year.

The prospect was raised by Manuel Valls, France’s prime minister, after Francois Hollande, the country’s president, said he would travel to Washington and Moscow in the coming days to meet Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin in an effort to form a stronger anti-Isil coalition following last week’s deadly attacks on Paris.

“Britain is well aware of this threat”.

Retired Lt. Gen. Richard Zahner, who was the top American military intelligence officer in Iraq in 2005 and 2006 and went on to lead the National Security Agency’s electronic spying arm, noted that al-Qaeda tried for two decades to develop chemical weapons and didn’t succeed, showing the technical and scientific difficulties.

Additionally, Russian Federation has supplied Iraqi forces with 1,000 protective suits against chemical attacks, Hakim al-Zamili, the head of the Iraqi parliament’s security and defense committee, told AP.

The recruits include scientists who worked for Saddam Hussein.

“Daesh is working very seriously to reach production of chemical weapons, particularly nerve gas”, al-Zamili said, using an Arabic acronym for the group.

“Even a few competent scientists and engineers, given the right motivation and a few material resources, can produce hazardous industrial and weapons-specific chemicals in limited quantities”, he said.

ISIS sees the illegal weapons as a path to “swift victory” and a way to “terrorize our enemies”, adding that all it needed was “to secure a safe environment to carry out experiments”, according to a 2013 report from the group obtained by Iraqi intelligence.

Mark Fitzpatrick, of the worldwide Institute for Strategic Affairs, said: “This is certainly a concern”.

Whether those chemical weapons were produced in-house, or were smuggled into Iraq from outside sources, is not clear.