Middle East Conflict Specialties

"I put a wet scarf on my face because when I saw the gas, I felt it."
I was afraid it might be something like [chemical weapons]. So I told my men to do the same."
Captain Mohammad Sewdin, Kurdish special forces

There's a tradition of chemical gas attacks in the Middle East. The horror of the use of chlorine at Ypres during the First World War, leaving soldiers who survived the attacks miserable physical survivors after the war led to its banning in the Geneva Protocol of 1925. But then, this is the Middle East, where tribal, ethnic, clan and sectarian violence is brutishly barbaric; what else might one expect of such people harbouring such deep, endemic hatred of one another?

Of course, during the ten-year war in Vietnam the advanced civilization of the United States used agent Orange to clear the jungles of cover for the guerrilla fighters in Vietnam, Laos and parts of Cambodia. The horrors that were visited on people living there were beyond description, and still are. Their effect is still being seen.

Deformed: Nguyen and Hung Vuong Pham, 14, and 15, await their daily bathing in the Kim Dong district of Hai Phong, Vietnam. Their days are occupied watching people pass by the front area of their home

Alawite Shia Baathist Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, infamously used chemicals to attack Sunni residents of Aleppo. He has proven to be even more sinister and given to mass slaughter than his father whose destruction of the town of Hama presented as a pinnacle of barbarity. That same year Sunni Baathist Iraqi President Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons to attack a Kurdish town in 1988, using napalm dropped on Halabja's residential areas from MiG and Mirage Aircraft, conducting up to 14 lethal raids, killing five thousand people.

People injured in what the government said was a chemical weapons attack, breathe through oxygen masks as they are treated at a hospital in the Syrian city of Aleppo March 19, 2013 (Reuters / George Ourfalian)

And now, of course, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham has also been accused by Iraqi and Syrian Kurds of having used chemical weapons. Kurdish officials have presented independent laboratory tests that conclude the jihadists used chlorine gas against the peshmerga forces in a truck suicide attack on January 23. Given the hideous forms of murder that Islamic State has engaged in, from crucifixion to beheading to immolation, no surprise at chemical attacks.

And the incidence of two other, previous chemical weapons attacks by the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham are also being investigated. General Aziz Wesi, in charge of a Kurdish special forces brigade, stated that the two attacks occurred December 26 and January 18, but were not publicized for fear of causing a panic situation among the vulnerable population, terrorized enough as it was by the actions of Islamic State.

Footage of the aftermath of the December attack has been produced, showing clearly peshmerga fighters coughing, pouring water over their heads in the wake of yet another suicide truck bombing that, according to authorities wounded 60 men. Capt. Sewdin who felt the brunt of that attack, was blinded for six hours and coughed up blood; he and his men were hospitalized requiring treatment for their trauma.

The Kurdistan Regional Security council had both video and lab results proving ISIS had used chlorine in the January 23 suicide truck bomb attack. A spokesman for the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, Peter Sawczak, who had been involved in monitoring Syria's dismantling of its chemical weapons stockpile, noted that no member state had made a request for an investigation into the attacks.

"We're concerned about any allegation of chemical weapons use. We're in touch daily with Iraq about the security situation", he said. Iraqi officials had claimed in October that chlorine-filled cylinders had been set off during late September clashes in Balad and Duluiya, with reports of the gas being used as well in the Syrian border town of Kobani.

Before the advent of ISIS, suicide bombers in May 2007 struck three cities in Anbar province, forcing 350 Iraqi civilians and six American troops to seek treatment for gas exposure. But the bombers involved were representatives of the Islamists associated with al-Qaeda in Iraq, later to become the Islamic State.

The Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad no longer uses chemical weapons in attacking Iraqi Sunnis. But are chemical weapons all that much worse than the deadly, maiming shrapnel that bursts out of the barrel bombs that the regime has popularly taken to using against its civilians? Or the starvation techniques used by the regime, encircling neighbourhoods where its 'enemy' civilians live, to ensure that no food, water or medication gets through to stave off death ... ?