ISIL uses toxic chemicals in its defense of Mosul

ISIS’s chemical weapons effort has been run by veteran of the Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons program – and by foreign volunteers with advanced degrees in chemistry. The program worked on weaponizing mustard agents, and, in Mosul, had access to large quantities of chlorine to use in mortars and rockets. Over the past year, ISIS has used both mustard and chlorine munitions against the Peshmerga forces, and on a few occasions against Kurdish civilians.

ISIS already demonstrated its ability to use chemical weapons on a larger scale: in April 2015 the Islamist group used hundreds of chlorine IEDs to defend Tikrit, slowing down the advance of the attacking Iraqi Army.

The U.S.-led coalition has been targeting ISIS chemical weapons capability since early 2015 – killing the program’s top scientists, capturing others, and destroying the program’s main research and production facilities.

Military analysts say that ISIS’s chemical capabilities, though limited, could complicate the campaign to liberate Mosul. Taking a large city is difficult under any circumstances, as the Germany’s failure to take Stalingrad and Leningrad during the Second World War shows – and as Israel’s reluctance to go into the Gaza Strip in 2014 proves. The combined forces of Syria, Russia, and Hezbollah have so far failed to take Aleppo from a few hundred rebels.

The campaign to take Mosul is more complicated than the campaign to take Aleppo, for two reasons: First, ISIS forces defending Mosul are more numerous, better equipped, and better dug-in than the rebels defending Aleppo.

Second, and more importantly: the coalition-led campaign to take Mosul is conducted by a Shi’a government in Baghdad, using Iraq’s mostly Shi’a army and Iran-trained Shi’a militias. In the past two years, these Shi’a forces committed atrocities against Sunni residents of towns and villages liberated from ISIS. The government in Baghdad has every interest – and is under considerable international pressures – not to allow similar atrocities to occur in Mosul. But this sensitivity to the welfare of the city’s Sunni resident also dictates a careful and slow approach, using precise munitions and careful targeting to minimize Sunni civilian casualties.

In Aleppo, the Assad regime faces no such limits or inhibitions: The Sunni residents of Aleppo have been the Syrian regime’s main targets. Moreover, with the help of Russia’s air attacks, the Assad regime has systematically destroyed the city’s civilian infrastructure – hospitals, clinics, water facilities, sewage treatment plants, power plants, the electrical grid, and more – in an effort to make life in Aleppo unbearable for the Sunni population, forcing it to flee, this increasing the areas of Syria “cleansed” of Sunnis.

France, the United States, and other nations are now working in the UN to have a war crime investigation launched against Syria and Russia over the manner in which they conducted the Aleppo campaign.

The introduction of chemical weapons by ISIS will make any campaign to liberate the city while, at the same time, trying to minimize the cost in civilian and military lives, much more complicated.

Military experts say health effects from the toxic fumes from oil and sulphur will likely subside in about eighteen months, but the toxic clouds could harm much of the plant and animal life in the area and make it difficult for local farmers to return to their fields until then.

“It is horrific for biodiversity and human health, but in the long term it will not have a hugely damaging impact,” Justin Bronk, a military expert at Royal United Services Institute, told the FT.

He says the fumes, while sometimes uncomfortable, will not be lethal if military forces contain the fire at the Mishraq plant. Iraqi forces said at the weekend they had controlled the blaze.

Bronk said Isis attempts to disrupt life and use toxic agents will only increase the more the Iraqi army and Kurdish Peshmerga forces close in on Mosul.

“This is a form of scorched earth policy,” he said. “They want to make it terrible to go back. They want to keep a lingering suspicion: is there something in the water? In the air? It’s doing the most you can do to destroy a sense of normality.”

Bronk said that the mustard gas stockpile in ISIS hands has likely degraded, but even in a weakened form, mustard gas could cause extreme blistering on the skin and even in inside the body, such as the lungs. But, he says, it is not likely to be fatal — the bigger threat is the lasting psychological impact.