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America and Russia accidentally saved thousands of Syrians from a horrible death
Imagine if ISIS had Bashar al-Assad's chemical weapons
The Islamic State has suffered some setbacks in recent weeks, losing some towns to Iraqi security forces, losing oil revenue to U.S. bombs, and losing face as it struggles to beat a smaller, less-equipped Kurdish militia in Kobani, Syria.
But that doesn't mean they have give up the fight, or their tactical use of fear and intimidation.
In the past few days, ISIS has slaughtered at least 200 members of an Iraqi Sunni tribe, Al Bu Nimr, for aligning themselves with the Iraqi army. And along with the group's conventional assaults, ISIS has reportedly started using chemical weapons, with probable cases documented against Kurdish fighters in Kobani and Iraq security forces in Duluiyah, Iraq.
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Nobody is entirely sure where ISIS is getting the toxic gases, but the main suspected sources is a large former Iraqi chemical weapons plant, Al Muthanna, that the group seized over the summer. "Officials and chemical weapons experts say the 2,500 degraded rockets filled with nerve agents that remain there are unlikely to be fit for use," reports The Washington Post.
Just because Iraq's chemical weapons stockpiles were old and degraded doesn't mean they weren't dangerous — as likely hundreds of U.S. troops found out the hard way. Still, "the Islamic State's reported chlorine attacks appear to have been largely ineffectual," The Post says. The unconfirmed mustard gas attack in Kobani was only slightly more deadly.
But they were nothing like the attacks on Syrian rebels endured from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's chemical weapons. You might remember the August 2013 sarin gas attack on a Damascus suburb, Ghouta, because it was the one that crossed President Obama's "red line," leading the U.S. to the brink of bombing the Assad regime. It's what happened next that kept a weapon of mass destruction and intimidation out of ISIS's hands.
The pivot from unilaterally bombing Assad to multilaterally dismantling his chemical weapons stockpile seems to have been an accident of diplomatic gamesmanship gone right. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov of Russia, an Assad ally, suggested to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry that Assad would give up his chemical weapons stockpile if Obama laid off. That was meant to call Kerry's bluff, after an apparently off-the-cuff suggestion a day earlier that Assad could avoid being bombed by handing over his chemical armaments.
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Everyone seemed kind of surprised when the plan worked out. It wasn't easy to confiscate all of Assad's chemical weapons and transport them to a U.S. ship — no country would take them — but less than a year after the deal was proposed, the Pentagon announced on Aug. 18 that all of Syria's declared chemical weapons have been destroyed. In all, more than 1,300 tons of Syrian chemical materials have been neutralized.
More needs to be done, says Gary Quinlan, Australia's ambassador to the U.N. and the current chairman of the U.N. Security Council. Notably, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons needs to find a way to destroy the 12 Syrian facilities that produced the chemical weapons — an OPCW team is in Damascus this week to finalize plans to do just that, starting this month.
If the U.S. and Russia hadn't stumbled into the agreement to rid Syria of its chemical weapons — months before ISIS launched its blitzkrieg across Syria and Iraq — there's a really good chance ISIS would have captured at least part of Assad's stockpile, just as it has seized all manner of armaments from vanquished Iraqi and Syria forces. ISIS has shown that is has no compunction about gassing people.
Assad's well-maintained sarin and mustard gas caches would have been much deadlier and more terrifying than Saddam Hussein's long dormant, partly neutralized stockpiles. Lots more Syrians would have died gruesome deaths. ISIS has plenty of conventional weapons that are proving perfectly capable of killing lots of Syrians and Iraqis. But there's a reason that chemical weapons are banned and guns and mortars aren't.
"I was in Syria recently and doctors there are very concerned about the potential effects of chlorine gas even though they live with barrel bombs and explosions every day," Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a former commander of the British military's chemical arms unit, tells NBC News. He continued:
They say 'we can hide from bombs and bullets but we cannot hide from gas.' In many ways that is irrational when you consider the low likelihood of dying from chlorine gas. You can avoid it by getting onto higher ground. Chemical weapons create terror and panic. We've already seen with recent beheadings that ISIS is an organization with no boundaries, so we should not be shocked or surprised. [Bretton-Gordon]
If ISIS had proper chemical weapons, rather than relatively inefficient chlorine gas, imagine the terror. Still, there may be a bright side in ISIS starting to use what gas it has. "We'll see a lot more of this from ISIS if they start to get defeated," Bretton-Gordon predicts. "It's a last-ditch tactic." We're lucky they have such lousy tools.
Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.
