Reuters: Chemical Weapon a New "Militant Tactic"

Thu, Feb 22, 2007 at 7:44:40 am PST

Not even the use of banned chemical weapons against civilians is enough to get al-Reuters to use the word “terrorist:” Second chlorine bomb may show new militant tactic.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The U.S. military said on Thursday a second bomb in two days using chlorine gas may have been a copycat attack amid concerns insurgents are broadening their range of weaponry to include crude chemical bombs.

U.S. and Iraqi forces were on alert on Thursday as Iraq marked the anniversary of the bombing of a Shi’ite shrine in Samarra, an act that unleashed a wave of sectarian violence and pushed the country to the brink of all-out civil war. A U.S. military spokesman said the military would keep a close eye to see whether insurgents were developing new methods after Wednesday’s bomb involving chlorine in Baghdad.

A police source put the death toll from the bomb at three with 35 more hospitalized. An Interior Ministry source said six were killed and 73 wounded, including many sickened by the gas.

“We were in the shops working when all of a sudden it exploded and we saw yellow fumes. Everybody was suffocating,” a man at a hospital told Reuters TV after Wednesday’s bomb.

On Tuesday, a truck rigged with explosives blew up north of Baghdad, killing at least five people and releasing a cloud of chlorine gas that left nearly 140 others sick, police said.

Chlorine gas was used as a weapon in World War One, but its use now in militant attacks in Iraq has particular resonance for Iraqis. Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons on Kurdish areas in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq War.

Notice: Reuters doesn’t even mention that these weapons have been banned under numerous international treaties for nearly a century.