Islamic State fighters traded sniper fire and mortar rounds with Iraqi troops and allied Shi’ite militia forces yesterday in the city of Tikrit amid reports the militants had used chlorine as a chemical weapon elsewhere in the country earlier this year.
A military official returned from the front in Tikrit said no major advances were made by either side nearly two weeks into an operation to win back the city IS fighters seized last June.
Iraqi Kurdish authorities said on Saturday they had proof the radical Islamist militants occupying large parts of the country’s north and west used chlorine against Kurdish peshmerga fighters in January in a car bombing attempt west of the city of Mosul.
The Baghdad government has not issued a statement on the semi-autonomous Kurdish region’s announcement. An official reached by Reuters on Sunday declined to comment.
No major advances have been made by either side
But the mayor of a town on the northern edge of Tikrit told Reuters that storage containers filled with chlorine were found by troops and mainly Shi’ite militiamen when they entered al-Alam last week, the day before they fought their way into Tikrit.
“We found a number of storage units containing chlorine that we think were seized by Daesh from water purification stations in different parts of Tikrit,” Laith al-Jubouri said, using the Arabic acronym for the group. He said security forces had sealed off the area where the containers were found and alerted Baghdad authorities.
On Tuesday, when Iraqi forces and allied militias pushed Islamic State fighters out of the town, a Reuters photographer was present when Iraqi police instructed journalists to stand back and hold their breath as they detonated a roadside bomb they suspected contained chlorine.
When they detonated the bomb, a yellowish plume burst into the air, and as bystanders coughed, officials shouted “be careful, it’s chlorine!”, the Reuters photographer said.
The statement from Kurdish authorities about Islamic State’s use of chlorine referred to footage of “similar attacks” during the recent fighting around Tikrit.
The military campaign to retake Tikrit has been stalled since Friday, when security officials said Iraqi forces and their militia allies would wait for reinforcements before moving forward. Two days later, back-up for the Iraqi forces had not yet arrived, and officials continued to stress the challenges they faced in flushing out militants in street-by-street battles and defusing bombs and booby traps they laid while retreating from parts of the city.