The US expects the Islamic State (IS) group to use crude chemical weapons as it tries to repel an Iraqi-led offensive on the Iraqi city of Mosul, US officials said, although it added that the group’s technical ability to develop such weapons is highly limited.
US forces have begun to regularly collect shell fragments to test for possible chemical agents, given the Islamic State group’s use of mustard agent in the months before Monday’s launch of the Mosul offensive, one official said.
In a previously undisclosed incident, US forces confirmed the presence of a sulfur mustard agent on Islamic State munition fragments on Oct. 5, a second official said.
Photo: AFP
The Islamic State group had targeted local forces, not US or coalition troops.
“Given ISIL’s reprehensible behavior and flagrant disregard for international standards and norms, this event is not surprising,” the second official told reporters, speaking on condition of anonymity, and using an acronym for Islamic State.
US officials do not believe the militants have so far been successful at developing chemical weapons with particularly lethal effects, meaning that conventional weapons are still the most dangerous threat for advancing Iraqi and Kurdish forces — and any foreign advisers who get close enough.
Sulfur mustard agents can cause blistering on exposed skin and lungs. However, at low doses that would not be deadly.
About 5,000 US military personnel are in Iraq.
More than 100 of them are embedded with Iraqi and Kurdish Peshmerga forces involved with the Mosul offensive, advising commanders and helping them ensure coalition air power hits the right targets, officials said, adding that those forces are not at the front lines.
The fall of Mosul would signal the defeat of the ultra-hardline Sunni extremists in Iraq, but could also lead to land grabs and sectarian bloodletting between groups that fought one another after the 2003 overthrow of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.
US President Barack Obama on Thursday last week estimated that perhaps 1 million civilians were still in Mosul, creating a challenge for Iraq and its Western backers trying to expel the group through force.
“If we aren’t successful in helping ordinary people as they’re fleeing from ISIL, then that makes us vulnerable to seeing ISIL return,” Obama told reporters in Washington.
The International Organization for Migration’s Iraq chief of mission Thomas Weiss on Tuesday said that he expected Islamic State militants to use Mosul residents as human shields and lent his voice to concerns about the dangers of chemical agents used in warfare.
The organization had not managed to procure many gas masks yet, despite those risks, Weiss said from Baghdad.
“We also fear, and there has been some evidence that ISIL might be using chemical weapons. Children, the elderly, disabled, will be particularly vulnerable,” Weiss said.
Attacking Iraqi forces are still 20km to 50km from the city itself and US officials believe that the Islamic State group is most likely to use chemical weapons later in the campaign, in what could be a difficult, protracted battle.
The leader of the extremists was reported to be among thousands of hardline militants still in the city, suggesting the group would go to great lengths to repel the coalition.
US officials believe some of Islamic State’s best fighters are in Mosul.
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