UNITED NATIONS (Sputnik) – In late October, Jabbar Yawar, the secretary general of the Peshmerga Ministry, told Sputnik Arabic that the Iraqi Defense Ministry had prepared a draft report detailing the use of chemical weapons against Iraqi Kurds in the north of the country by the ISIL extremist group.
"The reported use of chemical weapons by ISIL [Islamic State] against the Peshmerga is currently under investigation. Representatives from the OPCW have recently visited Baghdad to discuss this matter with Iraqi officials," Jan Kubis stated in an address to the UN Security Council.
Accusations of ISIL fighters using chemical weapons in Iraq surfaced as early as in the summer of 2014.
Germany’s federal intelligence agency BND collected blood samples in September from Kurds wounded during clashes with ISIL in northern Iraq which indicated that the terrorist group may have used mustard gas in the clashes. US experts reached similar conclusions earlier in the year.
In August, the UN Security Council authorized the launch of a one-year Joint Investigative Mechanism (JIM) with the OPCW into chemical weapons use in Syria, following a Russian-proposed draft resolution to address the use of such illegal weaponry by non-state armed groups in the country.
