The Guardian published a report yesterday on the mounting evidence that ISIS used mustard gas in an attack on the Syrian town of Marea, near Aleppo:
Doctors said the patients, who come from the town of Marea, suffered from skin lesions, respiratory problems and redness in the eyes following a barrage of attacks on Friday. The symptoms were were highly suggestive of exposure to a chemical agent.
The evidence raises the prospect, denied by the Pentagon, that Isis has gained access to chemical stockpiles from Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s regime thought to have been destroyed or degraded. A 2013 accord, brokered by Russia, took Assad’s declared chemicals out of Syria in an 11th-hour move to avert US bombing.
As the quote says, if this is accurate it’s potentially a direct refutation of the one success that the US has been able to point to in Syria: the supposed removal and destruction of Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons. Assad has probably continued to use chlorine gas since that 2013 accord, and ISIS has probably used it as well, but chlorine gas is dual use and easily available, which means Assad never had to give it up, and ISIS wouldn’t necessarily have a hard time getting its hands on it.
But there’s no gray area about mustard gas, and it’s not like you can just order the stuff online (is it? I’m a neophyte), so if ISIS has gotten its hands on some, that’s troubling and it raises questions about where it came from. Slate’s Joshua Keating runs through the possibilities:
This raises the serious of question of where ISIS got its hand on the gas, a weapon best known for its use in World War I that causes blisters, blindness, and lung damage. The Guardian points out that ISIS controls large areas of Iraq that could contain remnants of Saddam Hussein’s old chemical weapons program, but those stockpiles would likely be significantly degraded by now. ISIS affiliates in Libya may also have smuggled in mustard-filled shells from Muammar al-Qaddafi’s old program.
But it seems more plausible that they come from the stockpiles of the Syrian government, which were supposedly removed from the country under the terms of a U.S. and Russia-brokered deal in 2013 following the sarin gas attacks that killed hundreds of people in the city of Ghouta.
Assad declared a suspiciously low amount of mustard gas when he was supposed to be turning over all his chemical weapons back in 2013, and its sudden appearance on the Syrian battlefield certainly suggests that it originated with his stockpiles. The most ominous possibility is that ISIS has started producing the stuff itself, and I don’t think you can rule this out. They might have enough technicians under their control at this point that, maybe in conjunction with some of Saddam’s degraded stocks or some strategic shipments from Libya, they could have their own low-grade chemical weapons program going on now. But that’s sheer speculation.
Could Assad have given the gas to ISIS? Sure; I mean, Assad has aided ISIS before, usually tacitly but directly on occasion. Giving ISIS mustard gas to use on Syrian rebel groups helps Assad by degrading the rebels who were targeted and by increasing international fears about the menace posed by ISIS; anything that shifts the world’s assessment of Syrian threats from Assad to ISIS is good from Assad’s point of view. On the other hand, Assad would be taking a huge risk relying on ISIS’s word (I guess) only to use this mustard gas against rebels and not to use it against Assad himself. It seems a little easier to believe that ISIS recently seized some of the stuff, perhaps when it captured weapons caches at Tadmur and/or the major Syrian airbase nearby. That wouldn’t let Assad off the hook, as it would still prove that he lied to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons back in 2013.
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