Iraqi Kurds say Islamic State used chlorine gas against them

Reuters – Iraqi Kurdish authorities said on Saturday they had evidence that Islamic State had used chlorine gas as a chemical weapon against their peshmerga fighters in northern Iraq in January.

The Security Council of the semi-autonomous Kurdish region said in a statement to Reuters that the peshmerga had taken soil and clothing samples after an Islamic State car bombing attempt on Jan. 23.

It said laboratory analysis showed “the samples contained levels of chlorine that suggested the substance was used in weaponized form.” The Kurdish allegation could not be independently confirmed.

Chlorine is a choking agent whose use as a chemical weapon dates back to World War One. It is banned under the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention, which prohibits all use of toxic agents on the battlefield.

Peter Sawczak, spokesman for the Dutch-based Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, said: “We have not had a request from Iraq to investigate claims of use of chemical weapons in Iraq, and the OPCW cannot immediately verify the claims.”

Chlorine has been used “systematically” in the civil war in neighboring Syria, an OPCW fact-finding mission found last year. The OPCW would have to get its own samples to confirm the use of chemical weapons in a member state.

The Kurdish statement said the car bombing attempt happened on a highway between Mosul and the Syrian border. A Kurdish security source said that the peshmerga fired a rocket at the car carrying the bomb so there were no casualties, except for the suicide bomber.

About a dozen peshmerga fighters experienced symptoms of nausea, vomiting, dizziness or weakness, the source said.

The statement said the analysis was carried out in a European Union-certified laboratory after the soil and samples were sent by the Kurdish Regional Government to a “partner nation” in the U.S.-led coalition that is fighting Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria.

The source described the samples as “leftovers from the suicide bomber”, but declined to identify the laboratory.

The White House said in a statement it could not confirm the allegations but found them “deeply disturbing” and was monitoring the situation “very closely.”

A U.S. defense official said the use of chlorine as a weapon was a possible sign of “growing desperation due to the pressure being applied by coalition air power and Iraqi ground forces.”

Iraq’s Kurds were the victims of the deadliest chemical attack of modern times when Saddam Hussein’s air force bombed the town of Halabja in 1988, gassing at least 5,000 people to death.

WEAPONS EXPERT KILLED

The U.S. Central Command said on Jan. 30 that an Islamic State chemical weapons expert had been killed in a coalition air strike six days earlier near Mosul – the day after the car bombing cited in Saturday’s statement.

The expert, Abu Malik, had been a chemical weapons engineer during the rule of Saddam Hussein and then affiliated himself with al Qaeda in Iraq in 2005, Central Command said at the time. When he joined Islamic State, it gave the insurgent force a chemical weapons capability, it added.

Malcolm Dando, professor of international security at the University of Bradford, and an expert on biological and chemical warfare, said chlorine was an easy gas to obtain. “It’s extensively used, you only need to google industrial uses of chlorine, it’s extensively used industrially,” he told Reuters.

Western diplomats in The Hague, where the OPCW is based, have long feared IS fighters would get their hands on chemical weapons. It is not easy to make such weapons and IS tried to recruit experts when it took over Mosul last year, diplomatic sources told Reuters. They were not believed to have been successful.

Kurdish forces, backed by U.S.-led air strikes, have taken a prominent role in fighting the Islamic State jihadists who last year declared a cross-border caliphate after seizing land in eastern Syria and northern Iraq.

No international organization has documented the use of chemical weapons on Iraqi territory in the war with Islamic State.

The Kurdish authorities said in their statement they had “long suspected that (IS) fighters have been using chemical agents” and cited video footage from recent battles around the city of Tikrit between the militants and Iraqi troops and allied Shi’ite militias where “plumes of orange smoke” were visible.

Reuters was also e-mailed video footage and photos of what the Kurdish Security Council identified as images from the Jan. 23 attack. Among the photos were several canisters lying on the ground that the council says were found at the site and contained chlorine.

(Additional reporting by Anthony Deutsch in Amsterdam, Andy Bruce in London, andJulia Edwards and David Alexander in Washington; Writing by Maggie Fick; Editing byMark Trevelyan and Grant McCool)

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Kurdish officials say Islamic State fighters used chlorine gas

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News Sources on Sarin Gas in Syria

I know I was not the only one who thought it was very peculiar that as soon as Obama announced his “Red Line in the Sand” in Syria, which said that if Syria used chemical warfare, that would be crossing the “Red Line” and the U.S. would go to War with Syria, then days or weeks later a sarin gas attack? The videos of patients did not appear to have been from a Military Grade sarin gas (since the hops workers were handling the patients and did not get effected which is what would have happened if it had been military grade sarin) instead it appeared to be kitchen sink sarin like what was used in Japan. Even the delivery platform used looked like it was very akin to the rebels 5 gal water cooler plastic bottle rockets. They have another like this that uses 5 gal old propane tanks. They are launched from artillery. We know the Syrian governments delivery platform is much different and much more sophisticated. The Syrian regime sarin weapons atomizes the sarin and thus also why the wounded would need to be decontaminated prior to medical aide or transportation. – Shir Panjshir

Sy Hersh has a long piece in the London Review of Books accusing the Obama Administration of cherry-picking intelligence to present its case that Bashar al-Assad launched the chemical weapons attack on August 21.

To be clear, Hersh does not say that Assad did not launch the attack. Nor does he say al-Nusra carried out the attack. Rather, he shows that:

• At some unidentified time since the beginning of the Civil War, Assad had discovered and neutralized wiretaps on his inner circle, leaving US intelligence blind to discussions happening among his top aides
• Sensors planted to detect any movement of Assad’s CW immediately had not been triggered by the August 21 attack
• By June, some intelligence entity had concluded that an Iraqi member of al-Nusra had the capability to manufacture sarin in quantity

A lot of the story serves to establish that two days after the attack, the US had yet to respond to it, presumably because it did not have any intelligence Syria had launched the attack, in part because nothing had triggered the sensors that had worked in the past. To develop its intelligence on the attack days afterwards, the NSA performed key word searches on already-collected radio communications of lower level Syrian military figures.

‘There are literally thousands of tactical radio frequencies used by field units in Syria for mundane routine communications,’ he said, ‘and it would take a huge number of NSA cryptological technicians to listen in – and the useful return would be zilch.’ But the ‘chatter’ is routinely stored on computers. Once the scale of events on 21 August was understood, the NSA mounted a comprehensive effort to search for any links to the attack, sorting through the full archive of stored communications. A keyword or two would be selected and a filter would be employed to find relevant conversations. ‘What happened here is that the NSA intelligence weenies started with an event – the use of sarin – and reached to find chatter that might relate,’ the former official said. ‘This does not lead to a high confidence assessment, unless you start with high confidence that Bashar Assad ordered it, and began looking for anything that supports that belief.’ The cherry-picking was similar to the process used to justify the Iraq war.

Ultimately, according to one of Hersh’s sources, they used intelligence collected in response tolast December’s Syrian exercise on CW as the basis for what the Syrians would have been doing in case of an attack.

The former senior intelligence official explained that the hunt for relevant chatter went back to the exercise detected the previous December, in which, as Obama later said to the public, the Syrian army mobilised chemical weapons personnel and distributed gas masks to its troops. The White House’s government assessment and Obama’s speech were not descriptions of the specific events leading up to the 21 August attack, but an account of the sequence the Syrian military would have followed for any chemical attack. ‘They put together a back story,’ the former official said, ‘and there are lots of different pieces and parts. The template they used was the template that goes back to December.’

The White House presented this cherry-picked intelligence 9 days after the attack to a group of uncritical journalists (Hersh notes Jonathan Landay was excluded).

That’s the damning part of Hersh’s story on the intelligence used to support the Syrian warmongering (it is largely consistent with observations made at the time).

Hersh also describes how the NYT ignored the conclusions of MIT professor Theodore Postol, who determined at least some of the shells used in the attack were locally manufactured and had a much shorter range than publicly described.

Ultimately, though, Hersh’s biggest piece of news describes how someone — he doesn’t say who, but this part of his story relies on a senior intelligence consultant of unidentified nationality — sent Deputy DIA Director David Shedd a report on June 20 concluding that a former Iraqi CW expert with the capability of manufacturing sarin was operating in Eastern Ghouta.

An intelligence document issued in mid-summer dealt extensively with Ziyaad Tariq Ahmed, a chemical weapons expert formerly of the Iraqi military, who was said to have moved into Syria and to be operating in Eastern Ghouta. The consultant told me that Tariq had been identified ‘as an al-Nusra guy with a track record of making mustard gas in Iraq and someone who is implicated in making and using sarin’. He is regarded as a high-profile target by the American military.

On 20 June a four-page top secret cable summarising what had been learned about al-Nusra’s nerve gas capabilities was forwarded to David R. Shedd, deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. ‘What Shedd was briefed on was extensive and comprehensive,’ the consultant said. ‘It was not a bunch of “we believes”.’ He told me that the cable made no assessment as to whether the rebels or the Syrian army had initiated the attacks in March and April, but it did confirm previous reports that al-Nusra had the ability to acquire and use sarin.

Though Hersh provided ODNI with the specific cable markings on this report, ODNI spokesperson Shawn Turner claimed to be unable to find it. Turner also issued a denial that suggests some other country came to this conclusion.

[N]o American intelligence agency, including the DIA, ‘assesses that the al-Nusra Front has succeeded in developing a capacity to manufacture sarin’.

“No American agency” of course specifically leaves open the possibility another intelligence agency has made such a conclusion — perhaps the British, who were in no rush to go to war in Syria in response to the August 21 attack.

In spite of Turner’s denial, Hersh quotes one of his main sources, a former senior intelligence officer, noting that the military had concluded the rebels had the ability to manufacture sarin, too.

So that’s it, the central claims in Hersh’s piece. He ends it not with certainty about who launched the attack, but with questions raised about Obama’s subsequent decision to walk away from his planned attack.

The administration’s distortion of the facts surrounding the sarin attack raises an unavoidable question: do we have the whole story of Obama’s willingness to walk away from his ‘red line’ threat to bomb Syria? He had claimed to have an iron-clad case but suddenly agreed to take the issue to Congress, and later to accept Assad’s offer to relinquish his chemical weapons. It appears possible that at some point he was directly confronted with contradictory information: evidence strong enough to persuade him to cancel his attack plan, and take the criticism sure to come from Republicans.

That’s what I’ve always looked to. What underlying intelligence would lead to these actions?

• Our European allies refusing to go to war based on the intelligence they had seen
• US refusal to provide specific intelligence on planned attacks in Syria to the Saudis
• Assad deciding to give up his CW stocks
• Obama giving the Russians a big win in Syria, followed by subsequent progress on an Iran deal

One potential underlying motivation for all these actions might be the discovery that al Qaeda has achieved our long-feared aim, the acquisition of CW, which it was using to stage an attack in an effort to get Americans (as one of Hersh’s sources describe) to “provid[e] close air support for al-Nusra,” and that it was doing so with some knowledge or even assistance from our Saudi allies.

Such a discovery certainly might lead allies to avoid empowering al-Nusra. It would explain both Assad’s incentive to expose himself to Israeli attacks by disarming his CW, in an effort to provide real deniability for any attacks going forward. And perhaps most crucially, it might explain why we would move away from our role in granting the Saudis decisive help in extending their hegemony over the region, and move towards shoring up Iran as a counter-balance.

That is, al-Nusra wielding CW with the tacit support of the Saudis might explain all subsequent actions. [Update: If al-Nusra has CW and the Saudis have not objected, it might lead to these actions whether or not they staged the August 21 attack.]

Which leads me to one other tiny detail in Hersh’s story, his source’s description of who pushed the quick conclusion that Assad was responsible.

‘The immediate assumption was that Assad had done it,’ the former senior intelligence official told me. ‘The new director of the CIA, [John] Brennan, jumped to that conclusion … drives to the White House and says: “Look at what I’ve got!” It was all verbal; they just waved the bloody shirt. There was a lot of political pressure to bring Obama to the table to help the rebels, and there was wishful thinking that this [tying Assad to the sarin attack] would force Obama’s hand: “This is the Zimmermann telegram of the Syrian rebellion and now Obama can react.” [my emphasis]

Now, this description of Brennan is a tell. He is and was by no means “the new director” of the CIA; by early September he had been in place for 6 months already. That he was perceived to be such by a “former senior intelligence official” might suggest the source is someone at CIA who lost out with Brennan’s ascendance, perhaps someone close to Mike Morell, who had been a candidate for the position (Morell left CIA on August 9).

That by no means means this person is wrong. But CIA officers and alumni who opposed Brennan’s nomination have long condemned his close ties to the Saudis, even claiming he thwarted investigations of al Qaeda while serving as Riyadh station chief in the 1990s, investigations which might have prevented 9/11. So while it is a subtle point, it is worth noting that Hersh’s sources point to Brennan as the source for the quick conclusion that the Saudis wanted us to reach, that Assad had launched the attack.

Hersh’s sources analogize this cherry-picked intelligence to the case for the Iraq War. Are they, with that, also pointing to someone who had been a close aide for George Tenet when he cherry-picked that intelligence?

So I have listed a few of the many sources you can read about this

Sy Hersh Writing about Politicized Intelligence Again, Syria Edition

U.S. MILITARY CONFIRMS REBELS HAD SARIN – WND

Yes, the Syrian Rebels DO Have Access to Chemical Weapons – WB

U.S. plans for possibility that Assad could lose control of chemical arms cache- Washington post

Obama warns Syria amid rising concern over chemical weapons – Washinston post

Libya’s Prime Minister Confirms Presence of Chemical Weapons – Fox News

Libyans Loot Weapons From Desert Cache – WSJ

Libyan Weapons Depot Unguarded, Open to Looters – NTI

Al Qaeda may have chemical weapons, Spain’s counter-terror chief warns – The Telegraph

Libyan rebel commander admits his fighters have al-Qaeda links – The Telegraph

High-Level U.S. Intelligence Officers: Syrian Government Didn’t Launch Chemical Weapons – WB

Obama Administration Copies Bush’s Sidelining of Weapons Inspectors In Iraq – WB

Read the full transcript: Kerry’s speech on Syria, chemical weapons and the need to respond – WP

United States Army Medical Research Institute of Chemical Defense (USAMRICD)

Physicians for Human Rights

In Rush to Strike Syria, U.S. Tried to Derail U.N. Probe – IPS

Rep. Alan Grayson: Syria Intelligence Manipulated – US News

Intelligence Officials Confirm that Intelligence Is Being Politicized to Justify War In Syria – WB

Should We Fall Again for ‘Trust Me’? – ConsortiumNews Investigative Reports

The Risk from Distorting Intelligence – ConsortiumNews Investigative Reports

OFFICE OF THE DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE – Statement by the Director of Public Affairs for the Director of National Intelligence Shawn Turner, on the intelligence related to the terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya

Point-By-Point Rebuttal of U.S. Case for War In Syria – WB

Government Assessment of the Syrian Government’s Use of Chemical Weapons on August 21, 2013

To some, US case for Syrian gas attack, strike has too many holes – McClatchy D.C.

Experts: U.S. Case that Syrian Government Responsible for Chemical Weapons Is Weak – WB

Intelligence Experts Decry Weak Case For Syria Strike

Former aide: Powell WMD speech ‘lowest point in my life

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nathan-gardels/hans-blix-the-united-stat_b_3819367.html

Experts Doubt Syrian Chemical Weapons Claims

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/05/see-for-yourself-syrian-government-likely-did-not-use-chemical-weapons.html

Russia suggests Syria ‘chemical attack’ was ‘planned provocation’ by rebels

Following alleged sarin attack || Defense Minister: Assad used chemical weapons multiple times in Syria But Western experts are skeptical that nerve gas was used Wednesday, and describe other viable scenarios.

Syrian ‘Poison Gas’ Attack By Government Forces Claimed By Opposition

Obama Administration Copies Bush’s Sidelining of Weapons Inspectors In Iraq

EXCLUSIVE: Syrians In Ghouta Claim Saudi-Supplied Rebels Behind Chemical Attack

Evidence: Syria gas attack work of U.S. allies

The Wheels Just Came Off the Syria War Wagon

Chemical Weapon Specialists Talk Sarin, Saraqeb, and Khan Al-Assal – Part 2

Actual Video of UN Weapons Inspectors Examining Syrian Chemical Weapon Rockets

A chemical examination of rockets by the UN Committee on Muadamiyat al-Sham 26 82 013 – video

East Gota 29/08/2013 assembling some of the evidence obtained by the Commission inspection 1 – video

One United Nations peacekeepers as he spoke to a free preview of the injured after the army – 28/08/2013 – video

Muadamiyat al-Sham Video initial entry of the international mission to investigate the chemical file to the city 26 82 013 – video

UN weapons inspectors to leave Syria a day early – The Gaurdian

UN Investigators Leaving Syria, But Results Will Take Time

Which Syrian Chemical Attack Account Is More Credible?

Direct link between Assad and gas attack elusive for U.S.

Verify chemical weapons use before unleashing the dogs of war

Israel TV: Chemical weapons were fired by Assad’s brother’s unit – Israeli Times

‘IDF intercepted Syrian regime chatter on chemical attack’ – Israeli Times

12 U.S. Intelligence Officials Tell Obama It Wasn’t Assad

CIA Admits It Helped Overthrow the Democratically Elected Government of Iran in 1953

U.S. MILITARY: AL-QAEDA REBELS PRODUCED SARIN GAS FOR CHEMICAL ATTACKS IN SYRIA

(Flashback) UN accuses Syrian rebels of carrying out sarin gas attacks which had been blamed on Assad’s troops

Obama was likely wrong about sarin gas attack by Syria’s Assad

 http://nodisinfo.com/21985/

http://www.barenakedislam.com/2013/08/27/i-will-bring-just-one-sarin-sarin-gas-says-fsa-jihadist-rebel/

http://www.un.org/disarmament/content/slideshow/Secretary_General_Report_of_CW_Investigation.pdf

http://www.un.org/disarmament/content/slideshow/Secretary_General_Report_of_CW_Investigation.pdf

Classified U.S. Military Document: Syrian Rebels DO Have Chemical Weapons

Posted on September 12, 2013 by WashingtonsBlog

Al Qaeda In Syria Had Sarin Before August Attack

We’ve extensively documented that the Syrian rebels do have access to chemical weapons.

It turns out that a classified U.S. military document says the same thing.

A former senior security policy analyst in the office of the secretary of defense, F. Michael Maloof,reports at WND:

In a classified document just obtained by WND, the U.S. military confirms that sarin was confiscated earlier this year from members of the Jabhat al-Nusra Front, the most influential of the rebel Islamists fighting in Syria.

The document says sarin from al-Qaida in Iraq made its way into Turkey and that while some was seized, more could have been used in an attack last March on civilians and Syrian military soldiers in Aleppo.

The document, classified Secret/Noforn – “Not for foreign distribution” – came from the U.S. intelligence community’s National Ground Intelligence Center, or NGIC, and was made available to WND Tuesday.

It revealed that AQI had produced a “bench-scale” form of sarin in Iraq and then transferred it to Turkey.

A U.S. military source said there were a number of interrogations as well as some clan reports as part of what the document said were “50 general indicators to monitor progress and characterize the state of the ANF/AQI-associated Sarin chemical warfare agent developing effort.”

“This (document) depicts our assessment of the status of effort at its peak – primarily research and procurement activities – when disrupted in late May 2013 with the arrest of several key individuals in Iraq and Turkey,” the document said.

“Future reporting of indicators not previously observed would suggest that the effort continues to advance despite the arrests,” the NGIC document said.

The May 2013 seizure occurred when Turkish security forces discovered a two-kilogram cylinder with sarin gas while searching homes of Syrian militants from the al-Qaida-linked Jabhat al-Nusra Front following their initial detention.

The sarin gas was found in the homes of suspected Syrian Islamic radicals detained in the southern provinces of Adana and Mersia.

Some 12 suspected members of the al-Nusra Front were arrested. At the time, they were described by Turkish special anti-terror forces as the “most aggressive and successful arm” of the Syrian rebels.

In the seizure, Turkish anti-terror police also found a cache of weapons, documents and digital data.

***

Sources tell WND the documentation indicates that deadly sarin poison gas was manufactured in a Sunni-controlled region of Iraq and then transported to Turkey for use by the Syrian opposition, whose ranks have swelled with members of al-Qaida and affiliated groups.

High-level former U.S. intelligence officers say that it was the rebels – not the Syrian government – which carried out the chemical weapons attack.

They note that their high-level intelligence colleagues currently working in U.S. intelligence agenciesagree.

The director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare from 1988 to 2004 – who was a former senior consultant for the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Department of State – (Yossef Bodansky) also says that the rebels were the perpetrators of the chemical attack.