WASHINGTON – The areas of Iraq that ISIS has conquered could give the jihadist army access to some 2,500 rockets containing the deadly nerve gas Sarin.
The nerve agent housed at the Muthanna State Establishment is left over from the time the United States invaded and then bombed the facility during the first Gulf War in 1990.
Last June, Iraqi officials had informed the United Nations that ISIS had access to the facility and its abandoned weapons, which the Iraqi government had not destroyed. The Iraqi officials said that through remote CCTV, they observed ISIS jihadists looting the partially destroyed equipment and abandoned ordnance before the signal was knocked out, Britain’s Daily Mail reported.
In June, following a Wall Street Journal report of the ISIS takeover of the Muthanna facility, the State Department acknowledged ISIS had captured the stockpile of old chemical weapons produced while Saddam Hussein, deposed in 2003, was president of Iraq.
Pentagon spokesman Rear Admiral John Kirby maintained the U.S. military would not have left chemical material after the American 2011 pullout of Iraq if it posed a security threat.
“The only people who would likely be harmed by these chemical materials would be the people who tried to use or move them,” Kirby said.
Apart from the Muthanna facility, however, ISIS has had access to a secret Sarin poison gas production facility in northeast Iraq as a result of its alliance with a top military commander who previously was an aide to Saddam.
Deadly alliance
Sarin is a man-made toxin developed in Germany and can, according to the Centers for Disease Control, produce loss of consciousness, convulsions, paralysis and death in people who are exposed.
The newer Sarin gas facility in northeast Iraq, which the State Department hasn’t acknowledged, came as a result of an alliance between ISIS and Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, who was a top military commander and vice president to Hussein.
Douri remains wanted by U.S. authorities.
According to sources, he heads the Naqshbani Army, a coalition of Sunni groups in Mosul, the Kurdish city overrun by ISIS in June.
While there have been reported skirmishes between Douri’s Naqshbani Army and ISIS fighters, the jihadist group has the access and capability to produce the Sarin gas.
According to informed sources, the current Sarin facility is under the direction of former Iraqi Military Industries Brig. Gen. Adnan al-Dulaimi.
Dulaimi was a major player in Saddam’s chemical weapons production projects. He has been working in the Sunni-controlled region of northwestern Iraq, where the outlawed Baath party is located and produces the Sarin.
The Iraqi production of poisonous sarin nerve gas was confirmed to WND in September 2013 in a classified document from the U.S. intelligence community’s National Ground Intelligence Center or NGIC.
The document was classified Secret/Noforn – “Not for foreign distribution.”
It revealed “AQI” had produced a “bench-scale” form of Sarin in Iraq and had transferred it to Turkey.
AQI, or Al-Qaida in Iraq, was the precursor to the al-Qaida splinter group that came to be known as the Islamic State in Iraq and al Sham, or ISIS, later shortened by its founder, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, to the Islamic State with the creation of a caliphate last June.
‘Effort continues to advance’
A U.S. military source told WND there were a number of interrogations as well as some clan reports as part of what the NGIC document said were “50 general indicators to monitor progress and characterize the state of the ANF/AQI-associated sarin chemical warfare agent developing effort.”
In May 2013, some of the sarin transferred to Turkey for al-Nusra’s use was intercepted, and fighters in Turkey were arrested.
According to published reports, the sarin coming from Iraq but transported to Turkey allegedly was used in an attack on the Syrian city of Aleppo in March 2013 by Saudi Arabian-backed al-Nusra in its effort to overthrow the government of the Shiite-Alawite Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad.
The document further revealed sarin production had been under way for more than a year.
“Future reporting of indicators not previously observed would suggest that the effort continues to advance despite the arrests,” the NGIC document said.
In acknowledging to the Wall Street Journal that ISIS had taken over the Al-Muthanna chemical weapons last June, the State Department quickly attempted to minimize the seizure by insisting ISIS wouldn’t be able to make use of the materials because they was too old, contaminated and difficult to move.
“We do not believe the complex contains CW (chemical weapons) materials of military value and it would be difficult, if not impossible, to safely move the materials,” State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told the WSJ.
“The majority of the Al-Muthanna complex was bombed during Desert Storm, completely incapacitating Iraq’s chemical weapon production capabilities,” according to a 2004 Central Intelligence Agency report. “However, large stockpiles of chemical weapons and bulk agent survived.”
Most of these munitions were later destroyed under supervision of the United Nations. Some of the partially destroyed materials were sealed in two bunkers at Al-Muthanna.
