Islamic State militants attacked Kurdish forces in Iraq with mustard gas in 2015, marking the first known use of chemical weapons in the country since the fall of Saddam Hussein, a diplomat has said after tests by the global chemical arms watchdog.
A source at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) told the Reuters news agency that laboratory tests had come back positive for the sulphur mustard, after around 35 Kurdish troops were sickened on the battlefield in August 2015. The OPCW would not identify who used the chemical agent. But the diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity because the findings had not yet been released, said the result confirmed chemical weapons had been used by Isis fighters.
The samples were taken after the soldiers became ill during fighting against Isis militants south-west of Erbil, capital of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region.
The OPCW already concluded in October that mustard gas was used in 2015 in neighbouring Syria. Isis has declared a “caliphate” in territory it controls in both Iraq and Syria.
The matter was expected to be raised at the next meeting of the OPCW’s 41-member executive council in a month, an official said.
Experts were uncertain of how the group might have obtained chemical weapons or whether it had access to more.
Another diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Syria’s stockpile was a possible source of the sulphur mustard used in Iraq. That would mean Damascus had failed to fully disclose its chemical weapons programme, which was dismantled under international supervision in 2013-2014, the diplomat said.
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