According to a statement from the Kurdish Regional Security Council, the Islamic State has crossed that fabled WMD “red line” by deploying chemical weapons against Kurdish peshmerga forces fighting along the Iraqi border with Syria, near the captive city of Mosul.
According to reports from Fox News and the Associated Press, the attack was carried out in a very low-tech way: the Islamic State loaded poison gas cannisters onto a truck and drove the gas-spewing vehicle past Kurdish troops, who were seeking control of a vital road between Mosul and the Syrian border.
The peshmerga fired on the truck and finally managed to blow it up, releasing another cloud of gas into the air. Kurdish fighters involved in the incident, which occurred in late January, were reportedly treated for “dizziness, nausea, vomiting, and general weakness” after exposure to the gas. Based on these reports, the weapon involved appears to be chlorine gas.
It is not the first time there have been allegations of chemical weapons use by ISIS—it was claimed to be among the many horrors they visited upon the hotly-contested Kurdish city of Kobani—but this time there’s video:
Also, according to the Fox News report, there has been independent laboratory testing of soil and clothing exposed during the attack, and the Kurds claim to have recovered some twenty gas canisters from the destroyed ISIS truck.