MAINZ, Germany – Germany's Federal Intelligence Service (BND) said blood samples taken from injured soldiers confirms that the Islamic State group (ISIS) had used poison gas against the Kurdistan Region’s Peshmerga forces.
“We have knowledge of ISIS using mustard gas against Kurds in North Iraq,” German media reports quoted BND chief Gerhard Schindler as saying.
“We recovered injured Kurds (from the frontlines) and on the basis of blood samples we can confirm the use of poison gas,” he said.
The combat agent, which is prohibited by the international Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), originates either from old stocks of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein “or the Islamists have managed to produce the toxic gas themselves, after they took the University of Mosul with its chemistry laboratories,” according to Schindler.
In mid-August the German defense ministry and Kurdish Peshmerga officials said that Kurdish soldiers, trained by their German comrades, had apparently been the target of a chemical weapons attack.
Over the past month, ISIS has attacked the Peshmerga on several frontlines, mainly at Bashiq, Gwer and the Sultan Abdullah Heights near Mosul.
At the Sultan Abdullah front alone, ISIS fired 40 mortar shells at the Peshmerga armed with chemical components.
International investigators have closely examined blisters and burns on Peshmerga soldiers, but the team has yet to release the results. Samples of the chemical gas and soil from the site were also sent to special labs in the United States and Europe.
Initially, it was believed that ISIS had used mustard gas against the Peshmerga -- the same gas used by Saddam’s regime against Halabja in 1988.
Last spring, the Kurdish government informed its Western allies that Peshmerga forces were attacked with chlorine gas.
Late last year, ISIS reportedly seized an Iraqi chemical weapons factory with about 2,500 rockets, containing the deadly nerve agent Sarin. But there was no confirmation that the rockets were functional or if they could be operated by ISIS at all.
The Kurdistan Regional Government and Peshmerga officials have requested allies for special protective equipment against possible future poison gas attacks. The protective gear has now become a central point of discussions between Kurdish and coalition forces.
Since September last year about 90 German soldiers have been stationed near Erbil in the Kurdistan Region to train Peshmerga forces. Germany is one of the few countries in the US-led coalition that is supplying arms directly to Kurdish troops, instead of through the Iraqi central government in Baghdad.
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