Russia Prepares UN Mandate on Iraq to Investigate Chemical Attacks

The UN Security Council and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons can no longer ignore the issue of Iraqi transborder terrorist activity utilizing chemical weapons, a Russian Foreign Ministry official said.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) – Moscow has prepared a UN Security Council resolution in regard to expanding the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) on Iraq to investigate chemical attacks in the country, the head of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Department on Arms Control said.

“It is clear that the UN Security Council and the OPCW can no longer ignore the issue of transborder terrorist activity utilizing chemical weapons. We have prepared a project of a [UN] Security Council resolution mandate on Iraq, created together with the OPCW-UN Joint Mission, to extend investigations into cases of the possible use of chemical weapons in Syria [to Iraq as well],” Mikhail Ulyanov told RIA Novosti in an interview.

According to Ulyanov, the use of chemicals by Islamist groups has “taken on a wide-scale, systematic, and transborder character.”

On Thursday, Russia's UN envoy Vitaly Churkin, as president of the UN Security Council (UNSC) for September, signed a letter on behalf of the UNSC authorizing the launch of a joint UN-OPCW (Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons) probe into the use of chemical weapons in Syria.

Multiple reports on the use of chemical weapons by the Islamic State and other militant groups in neighboring Iraq have recently emerged in media, supplemented with statements by German, US and Kurdish officials.

In August, a field test carried out by the US military on fragments of mortar fired at Kurdish military forces in the northern Iraqi city of Makhmour revealed traces of a sulfur mustard-gas agent.