Posts Tagged chemical weapons

ISIS Grabs Former Chemical Weapons Locations in Iraq

From AP:

The Islamic State extremist group has taken control of a vast former chemical weapons facility northwest of Baghdad, where remnants of 2,500 degraded chemical rockets filled decades ago with the deadly nerve agent sarin are stored along with other chemical warfare agents, Iraq said in a letter circulated Tuesday at the United Nations.

The U.S. government played down the threat from the takeover, saying there are no intact chemical weapons and it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to use the material for military purposes.

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Syria and the Limits of Comparison

Syria and the Limits of Comparison is republished with permission of Stratfor.”

By Robert D. Kaplan

Because so many war plans simply do not survive the reality of war itself, each war is a unique universe unto its own and thus comparisons with previous wars, while useful, may also prove illusory. One of the many wrong assumptions about the Second Gulf War before it started was that it would somehow be like the First Gulf War, in which the pessimists had been humiliated by the ease of the victory. Indeed, the Second Gulf War unfolded in vastly different ways, this time proving the pessimists right. That is why the recent media refrain comparing a military operation in Syria with the one in Kosovo in 1999 worries me.

There are profound differences. Read the rest of this entry »

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Chemical-weapon attack by the Taliban: revealed in U.S. military logs released by WikiLeaks

“Most of the reports catalog counterinsurgency’s basics — weapons caches found, gun battles fought, village elders chatted up.

But buried in the tens of thousands of U.S. military logs dropped Sunday night by WikiLeaks are incidents that are anything but routine: a suspected chemical-weapon attack by the Taliban; rumors of Al Qaeda poisoning the U.S. military food supply; a tip about Osama Bin Laden’s status.”

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/07/chem-weapons-scare-bin-laden-clue-in-wikileaks-wardocs-dump?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29

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