Jim Geraghty:
A few weeks ago, I wrote that it’s a sad fact that almost no one cares about chemical weapons attacks in Syria — or anywhere else, really.
Not even when it’s aimed at our troops, apparently:
ISIS is suspected of firing a shell with mustard agent that landed at the Qayyara air base in Iraq Tuesday where US and Iraqi troops are operating, according to several US officials.
The shell was categorized by officials as either a rocket or artillery shell. After it landed on the base, just south of Mosul, US troops tested it and received an initial reading for a chemical agent they believe is mustard.
No US troops were hurt or have displayed symptoms of exposure to mustard agent.
One official said the agent had “low purity” and was “poorly weaponized.” A second official called it “ineffective.”
Newsbusters notices that none of the network evening-news broadcasts mentioned the mustard-gas attack.
You have to go over to the U.K. Daily Telegraph to get a sense of ISIS’s chemical-weapons capabilities and the worst-case scenario:
While it is the first chemical attack against US troops, there have been 20 documented cases of chemical weapons being used against the Kurdish Peshmerga army, which has been moving in on the city from the east for the last few months.
Hamish de Bretton Gordon, former commanding officer of the UK Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Regiment (CBRN), who has been advising and training the Peshmerga in Kurdistan, said troops should be prepared for bigger and more lethal chemical attacks.
He told the Telegraph that Peshmerga commanders have intelligence that Isil has rigged with explosives a chemical plant 25 miles south of Mosul and six miles north of Qayyarah.
An explosion at Misraq, which holds thousands of tonnes sulphur dioxide and hydrogen sulphide, could be catastrophic.
Mr de Bretton Gordon’s downwind predictions of six-10 miles would mean Iraqi, and any supporting US, forces would be at risk.
ISIS controls a chemical plant that produces sulfur? Does this not seem alarming to anyone?
My super-secret spying techniques (don’t tell anyone it’s Google searching) found this picture of the Misraq State Sulfur Company facility, upgraded in 2015:
Unless this could make global warming worse the left could not care less. This is also not something they could exploit to restrict gun ownership, bring in more illegal immigrants or make elections more easily corrupted.
ISIS using mustard gas from WW I more reasons we need to stop obama’s plans for more so called refugees we don’t need this on american soil in fact we dont need obama treading on american soil anymore
Wanna bet?
Give it 10 years, maybe less.
I knew soldiers who were exposed to whatever Saddam had going in the first Gulf war and, trust me, they were exposed to something that made them sick-as-dogs for the rest of their lives.
Getting the Navy or, later, the VA to acknowledge that was problematic.
it will be again.
But it doesn’t alter the exposure.
The reason the media didn’t cover it is their bias toward letting obama tell them what news is and what isn’t.
They’ve done their utmost to conceal the 5,000 plus WMD our troops discovered during OIF as well as our casualties from exposure to them. Why should they change course now?
@another vet –
There are plenty who will tell you that every chemical weapon, old and new, was accounted for, that Saddam’s Iraq did not manufacture VX, and on and on. An old weapon is just as dangerous as a freshly prepared one, probably more dangerous. They will also argue the chemical detectors were giving false warnings, but you would have to assume all the detectors were faulty which is highly unlikely.
Regarding the media, every outlet across the board, have soft-pedaled the story, so I wouldn’t count on them to be a reliable source.
@David:
There are lots of “experts” out there who know it all. Some can’t even come around to admit that there were three terror attacks in this country over the weekend that were carried out by Radical Islamists. It’s amateur hour. Now that there has been a successful IED attack, we shall see if this starts a tend you and I talked about before in that they would start using IED’s over here. Will this be a lone incident or is it the start of a new phase in how they carry out their attacks? Will they start to get better at what they do and start making them more deadly and get more efficient at deploying them? That’s the way it started over there.
@another vet: I still remember that huge warehouse of pesticides/nerve agent . Drums stacked 4-6 high in a ware house 50′ deep by over 200′ long. The farmers had no means to apply it except by air. The only crop requiring spraying was the date crop and that did not require the type of pesticide that was in that ware house.
@Randy: But the “experts” say that isn’t so. We imagined all of it.
@Randy:
Absolutely…the organophosphate “pesticides” that were stored in ammo bunkers and surrounded by barb wire fences and guard towers. They were there as far as the eye could see during Desert Storm when my cavalry platoon rolled into the area SE of Basra.
@Pete: But no WMDs right? The media only reports on what the left wants to hear. What is really important is that the middle-east media is strictly controlled by the government. The people know that. So when they see US media reports, the people from the middle -east think the situation is much worse because they think the US government is hiding most information.