Proof emerges of Daesh chemical weapons

New York: Daesh terrorists appear to have manufactured rudimentary chemical warfare shells and attacked Kurdish positions in Iraq and Syria with them as many as three times in recent weeks, according to field investigators, Kurdish officials and a Western ordnance disposal technician who examined the incidents and recovered one of the shells.

The development, which the investigators said involved toxic industrial or agricultural chemicals repurposed as weapons, signalled a potential escalation of the group’s capabilities, though it was not entirely without precedent.

Beginning more than a decade ago, Islamist militants in Iraq have occasionally used chlorine or old chemical warfare shells in makeshift bombs against American and Iraqi government forces. And Kurdish forces have claimed that terrorists affiliated with Daesh used a chlorine-based chemical in at least one suicide truck bomb in Iraq this year.

Firing chemical mortar shells across distances, however, as opposed to dispersing toxic chemicals via truck bombs or stationary devices, would be a new tactic for the group, and would require its munitions makers to overcome a significantly more difficult technical challenge.

Chemical weapons, internationally condemned and banned in most of the world, are often less lethal than conventional munitions, including when used in improvised fashion. But they are indiscriminate by nature and difficult to defend against without specialised equipment — traits that lend them potent psychological and political effects.

In the clearest recent incident, a 120-mm chemical mortar shell struck sandbag fortifications at a Kurdish military position near Mosul Dam on June 21 or 22, the investigators said, and caused several Kurdish fighters near where it landed to become ill.

The shell did not explode and was recovered nearly intact on June 29 by Gregory Robin, a former French military ordnance disposal technician who now works for Sahan Research, a think tank partnered with Conflict Armament Research, a private organisation that has been documenting and tracing weapons used in the conflict. Both research groups are registered in Britain.

The tail of the shell had been broken, Robin said by telephone Friday, and was leaking a liquid that emanated a powerful odour of chlorine and caused irritation to the airways and eyes.

It was the first time, according to Robin and James Bevan, the director of Conflict Armament Research, that such a shell had been found in the conflict.

In an internal report to the Kurdish government in Iraq, the research groups noted the mortar shell appeared to have been manufactured in a “Daesh workshop by casting iron into mold method. The mortar contains a warhead filled with a chemical agent, most probably chlorine.”

Conflict Armament Research and Sahan Research often work with the Kurdistan Region Security Council. Robin and Bevan said the council had contracted a laboratory to analyse residue samples removed from the weapon.

“Soon we should have an exact composition of the chemical in this projectile, but I am certain it is chlorine,” Robin said.

He added: “What I don’t know is what kind of burster charge it had,” referring to the small explosive charge intended to break open the shell and distribute its liquid contents. The shell had not exploded, he said, because, inexplicably, it did not contain a fuse.

Whether any finding from tests underwritten by Kurdish authorities would be internationally recognised is uncertain, as the Kurdish forces are party to the conflict.

The week after Robin collected the shell, on July 6, another investigator found evidence that the research groups said indicated two separate attacks with chemical projectiles in Kurdish territory in the northeastern corner of Syria.

Those attacks, at Tel Brak and Hasakah, occurred in late June and appeared to involve shells or small rockets containing an industrial chemical sometimes used as a pesticide, the investigators said.

In the incidents in Syria, Bevan said, multiple shells struck in agricultural fields near three buildings used by Kurdish militia forces known as the YPG, or Peoples Protection Units, in Tel Brak. More shells, he said, landed in civilian areas in Hasakah; at least one struck a civilian home.

Late on Friday, the YPG released a statement denouncing what it called “criminal actions” and said that in the last four weeks its forces had captured gas masks from Daesh fighters.

The attacks at Tel Brak sickened 12 YPG fighters, who suffered many symptoms, including headaches, breathing difficulties, nausea, vomiting, eye irritation, disorientation, temporary paralysis and, in some cases, loss of consciousness, said a Western investigator for Conflict Armament Research who asked that his name be withheld for security reasons.

Based on laboratory results provided by Kurdish medical officials in Qamishli, where the afflicted fighters were treated and tested, the research groups said they tentatively concluded the shells contained phosphine, a chemical sometimes used to fumigate stored grains.

A document from the medical authorities, translated by The New York Times, referred to the laboratory tests but did not describe their methodology or show specific results.

Bevan also noted that tests so far were not conclusive.

No direct samples of the substance in the shells had been independently gathered, he said, in part because the field investigator, who did not have chemical protective equipment, experienced the onset of symptoms while working near the impact craters and had to leave the area.

Some of the shells’ characteristics from the incidents in Syria, based on photographs of the fragments, did not appear consistent with chemical weapons — including that the shell walls appeared to be thick. Chemical weapons often have thinner metal skins than weapons designed to fragment.

But both Robin and the field investigator said it was possible the attacks were tests of new weapons from Daesh’s makeshift munitions production lines.