On October 8, several hundred Iraqi soldiers were poisoned as they ate their iftar (Ramadan fast-breaking) meal. Some reports allege that a small group of them have already died. While Iraqi military officials said they had not ruled out spoiled food as the cause, the soldiers? symptoms?immediately falling over and bleeding from the ears and nose–are inconsistent with simple food poisoning. Media sources citing individuals involved in the investigation say the food may have been laced with cyanide.
Incidents involving non-conventional weapons, especially chemical weapons, are increasingly likely because of the evidence of experimentation and development of these weapons in the Iraqi theater. Coalition troops have discovered crude chemical weapons? (CW) laboratories, and an Iraqi terrorist group, Ansar al-Islam , developed rudimentary CW capability before the onset of the war in 2003. During his terrorist career in Iraq, Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi was believed to have been involved in these efforts.
The incident has frightening ramifications inside and outside Iraq. Iraq is effectively the new testing ground for the Jihadist movement, a place where ongoing fighting allows Jihadists to develop new methods and technologies and hone their skills with practice. The Iraqi theater merits careful observation not just for those involved in the effort in Iraq, but all over the world.
Techniques for violence being employed?and perfected–in Iraq will make their way out of Iraq. The Jihadist movement is global and fluid and is characterized by a fast-paced transfer of knowledge, individuals, and expertise between organizations and regions united by a shared ideology. At least two major Iraqi insurgent groups, Ansar al-Sunna and al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers , have significant networks outside of Iraq through which they can transfer technical expertise and resources.
The al-Qaeda core is known to have experimented with both potassium and hydrogen cyanide in the 1990s, and Iraqi groups may also have possessed the substance for at least a couple years. The delay in using cyanide (if this was the agent used) likely resulted from the difficulty in determining an effective delivery method. This recent incident may indicate that insurgent groups are exploring creative ways to deliver non-conventional weapons to large groups of people. With the learning curve exhibited by Iraqi terrorist groups, Coalition and Iraqi forces can expect future attacks to be adjusted and recalibrated to be more lethal than this first try.
This potential CW incident comes just a week and a half after Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, leader of al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers, issued an audio-recorded speech in which he called on scientists, engineers, and other technical experts to come to Iraq to make non-conventional weapons: ?The large American camps are an ideal place to test your non-conventional bombs ? germ bombs, dirty bombs, and the like,? said al-Muhajir. Neither al-Qaeda nor any other terrorist group has claimed responsibility for this attack, but it may have been timed to underscore the seriousness of al-Muhajir?s intent.
Al-Muhajir is the first radical leader or cleric to publicly recommend non-conventional attacks on the soil of a Muslim country; other radical figures who have recommended or approved of these weapons have recommended their deployment in ?infidel? territories.