Islamic State Trying To Develop Chemical Weapons
Western nations and their allies in the Middle East are trying to keep a close eye on an ambitious program on the use of chemical weapons by the terrorist group “Islamic State.” A few days after terrorist actions were carried out in Paris that resulted in 129 casualties, the Prime Minister of France Manuel Valls delivered a warning speech.
“We bear in mind that there is a threat of the use of chemical or bacteriological weapons. We aren’t ruling anything out,” he stated, in his speech at the Parliament. The Kurds voiced their own concerns, accusing Islamic State of using chemical weapons in Iraq and Syria. The Director of the Intelligence Agency of the Kurdish regional administration stated in his interview to the Voice of America that they (militants of Islamic States) have laboratories producing chemical weapons in Mosul and Al-Raqqah.
He added, “Heaven forbid they have modern chemical weapons. This could make everything worse.”
American officials are worried by attempts of Islamists to develop weapons of mass destruction, but they evaluated the actual capacity of Islamic State to produce them as minimal.
An employee of an anti-terrorist agency stated that it would not be surprising if ISIS succeed in making primitive, chlorine-based weapons using common and available materials. However, even if they had such weapons, a full production program was far from their current abilities. This month the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons found that chemical weapons were used in military actions that took place in the Marea area, north of Aleppo.