More horror stories have emerged from the Islamic State, including reports of commanders who fail to carry out their duties being fed to hungry dogs and chemical weapons being tested on the “caliphate’s” prisoners.
The dog execution report comes from a Kurdish Peshmerga commander in northern Iraq, by way of the UK Daily Mail. According to Hasan Khala Hasan, ISIS has been developing more brutal execution methods to terrorize its forces into obeying orders and fighting more fiercely, as the terror state suffers a string of battlefield defeats.
Hasan described executions where failed commanders in Iraq were tied to trees and then mauled by dogs until they died. Meanwhile, a new propaganda video from ISIS in Yemen shows a prisoner crushed to death by a large boulder. Last week, a report from the ISIS-held city of Mosul in Iraq described the execution of alleged spies by slowly dissolving them in acid.
The latest news from Mosul, per the UK Telegraph, is that ISIS has been setting up chemical weapons laboratories in residential neighborhoods, to shield them against coalition airstrikes. In these labs, home-brewed chlorine and mustard gases are tested on prisoners.
“Residents of al-Mohandseen — which had been a wealthy Christian neighbourhood until Isil seized the city — said several houses had been taken over by Isil officials in the last few weeks. A number of large unmarked trucks have been parked outside and more recently they reported seeing dozens of dead dogs and rabbits in nearby rubbish containers,” the Telegraph writes.
“The report also claimed Isil has been carrying out experiments on prisoners they are holding at a secret jail in al-Andalus, in the Nineveh governorate of Mosul, exposing them to chlorine and mustard gas to test the toxicity,” the Telegraph continues. “Residents near the prison have reported breathing difficulties and children developing severe rashes — some of the side effects of exposure to such substances.”
There is every reason to believe the Islamic State can deploy chemical weapons to defend its vital territory in Iraq and Syria. They have already used such weapons against Kurdish forces and Iraqi civilians, and they are believed to have seized a large chemical weapons stockpile from the Syrian military.
Also, as the Telegraph notes, a distressing number of Iraqi chemical weapons experts from the Saddam Hussein regime have gone to work for the Islamic States. One such individual is Abu Shaima, formerly of the University of Baghdad, who has reportedly taken over the ISIS chemical weapons research unit after the capture of its previous director by U.S. special forces in March.