ISIL Uses Chemical Weapons against Civilians in Nineveh

The district governor of Mosul Hussein Ali Hajem told the Sputnik Arabic that the ISIL chemical attack on al-Osajah village killed 17 civilians, mostly women and children.

He said that the missiles fired at the residential areas in the village most likely included chlorine gas which suffocated the civilians.

Elsewhere, Hajem said that the ISIL’s indiscriminate attacks against a number of villages in Qayara, Southern Mosul, in the past 24 hours killed three civilians and injured four others.

In May, an intergovernmental organization warned of the “extremely worrying” signs that ISIL terrorist group could be developing chemical weapons of its own.

Director General of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) Ahmet Uzumcu said that the Takfiri terrorist group might have already used them both in Iraq and Syria.

Uzumcu said fact-finding teams from The Hague-based watchdog have discovered evidence that suggest the use of sulfur mustard in attacks in the two crisis-hit Arab countries.

“Although they could not attribute this to ISIL… there are strong suspicions that they may have used” chemical weapons, Uzumcu said.

“Secondly, the suspicions are that they may have produced it themselves, which is extremely worrying,” he pointed out.

“It proves that they have the technology, know-how and also access to the materials which might be used for the production of chemical weapons,” Uzumcu said on the sidelines of a three-day conference in the Hague.

The OPCW director general also called for vigilance to prevent potential chemical attacks outside Syria and Iraq.

“The international community should be very vigilant to such threats and cooperate further to prevent such attacks from occurring elsewhere,” he said.

On April 7, 23 people were killed and over 100 others injured in a chemical attack by ISIL terrorists against members of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) in the Syrian city of Aleppo.

Videos posted online purportedly show yellow gas rising over Sheikh Maqsood neighborhood in Aleppo, located some 355 kilometers North of the capital Damascus.

The development came only three days after al-Ikhbariyah Syria satellite television Network reported that ISIL had fired a barrage of rockets, carrying mustard gas, at a Syrian military airport in the Eastern city of Deir Ezzur.

According to a report by the Syrian-American Medical Society, ISIL has carried out more than 160 attacks involving “poisonous or asphyxiating agents, such as sarin, chlorine, and mustard gas” since the beginning of the Syrian conflict in 2011. At least 1,491 people have been killed in the chemical attacks.

In August 2013, hundreds of people were also killed in a chemical attack in the Ghouta suburb of Damascus. According to reports, the rockets used in the assault were handmade and contained sarin.

According to a February report by the Syrian Center for Policy Research, the conflict has claimed the lives of over 470,000 people, injured 1.9 million others, and displaced nearly half of the pre-war population of about 23 million within or beyond Syria’s borders.

Damascus accuses Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar of funding and arming anti-Syria terrorist groups, including ISIL.