Posts Tagged With: Saddam Hussein
Did the ISIS in Iraq find Saddam Hussein’s WMD stockpiles of chemical weapons? While the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has been confirmed to have seized an old chemical weapons plant there seems to be a dispute over whether or not the remaining tons of chemical weapons like sarin and mustard could still be weaponized into a dangerous form.
In a related report by The Inquisitr, former CIA director Michael Hayden is claiming that the ISIS in Iraq have essentially won the war at this point and that it is very likely the nation will be split into three sections. Due to the Iraq crisis oil prices have jumped and some Americans may wonder whether this means U.S. gas prices will be rising soon, as well. But as it turns out China has a lot more to lose if Iraq’s oil supply is blocked even though America spent trillions of dollars on the Iraq war.
After the end of the Iraq War, Saddam’s missing WMDs were very controversial, leading some to claim President George W Bush lied about Iraq’s WMD programs. As one of the reasons for going to war, Bush had argued Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction might end up in the hands of terrorist groups like ISIS. After Iraq was occupied, reports from the CIA concluded they found Iraq’s WMD development programs, which included a very early development nuclear weapons program and an unexpected air force buried in the sand, but no large stockpiles of chemical weapons or other major WMDs… at first.
Tanks used to store Iraqi chemical weapons.
Wikileaks revealed in 2010 that during the occupation of Iraq the U.S. military discovered many small caches of chemical weapons, but others claimed that Russia had helped Hussein hide the most dangerous WMD stockpiles into Syria. The plot took a new twist when Syrian rebels began identifying weapons that came from Iraq last year. Then when Russia began to oversee Assad’s supposed disarmament of chemical weapons John A. Shaw, the former Pentagon official who claims to have tracked Iraq’s WMDs being moved out by Russian special forces, claimed that it was possible some of these chemical weapons were being hid back in Iraq.
Iraqi officials inspect a pile of destroyed chemical bombs.
With that history behind us, now The Telegraph reports that Iraq’s WMD programs may in fact end up being used by the al-Qaeda linked terrorist group ISIS:
“The jihadist group bringing terror to Iraq overran a Saddam Hussein chemical weapons complex on Thursday, gaining access to disused stores of hundreds of tonnes of potentially deadly poisons including mustard gas and sarin…. Isis has shown ambitions to seize and use chemical weapons in Syria leading experts to warn last night that the group could turn to improvised weapons to carry out a deadly attack in Iraq.”
Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a former commander of Britain’s chemical weapons regiment, believes ISIS will not be able to build a fully functional WMD using Iraq’s chemical weapon stockpiles since they’re buried in concrete but they could still be dangerous:
“It is doubtful that Isis have the expertise to use a fully functioning chemical munition but there are materials on site that could be used in an improvised explosive device. We have seen that Isis has used chemicals in explosions in Iraq before and has carried out experiments in Syria.”
The State Department’s spokesperson Jen Psaki commented on the situation:
“We remain concerned about the seizure of any military site by the ISIL. We do not believe that the complex contains CW materials of military value and it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to safely move the materials.”
Are you surprised that former President George W Bush may have been right about Iraq’s WMD programs created by Saddam Hussein?
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