30 of 100 locals in DAESH killed – FBI fears return of extremists … Pentagon warns chemical arms

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KUWAIT CITY, Sept 27, (Agencies): According to news reports reaching Kuwait, 30 Kuwaitis and bedoun out of the 100 who had been fighting alongside the Islamic State (IS) or the so-called DAESH and the Al-Nusra Front in Syria have died on the battlefield, reports Al-Jarida daily informed sources.

The fighters were involved in the conflict since its outbreak several years ago. The sources added 70 Kuwaitis and bedoun are still fighting in the ranks of the two terrorist organizations.

On the other hand, sources also said the Public Prosecutor released on KD 1,000 bail an unidentified ‘fighter’ who had returned from Syria. He was charged with joining DAESH and receiving training in the use of arms and ammunition and fighting against the Syrian army.

It has been reported the suspect has admitted to fighting the Syrian regime, but denied joining DAESH. The Islamic State group could use mustard gas against an Iraqi offensive to retake Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, the US Defense Department said Monday. “We can fully expect that as this road towards Mosul progresses, ISIL is likely to try to use it again,” Pentagon spokesman Jeff Davis told reporters, using another acronym for the IS group. Davis said that the jihadists had already used mustard gas “at least a couple dozen” times, packing a “rudimentary” form of the chemical weapon into crude, makeshift munitions.

According to the spokesman, the IS group’s mustard gas is typically a powder bound together with tar.

It is “not generally in a lethal concentration” and “not anything we would consider significant militarily,” he said. “More irritant that anything else.” Iraqi security forces, backed by USled coalition air power, are in the final weeks of preparing operations ahead of an assault to recapture Mosul, which the IS group seized in 2014 and which remains the jihadists’ last main stronghold in Iraq.

The Pentagon suspects that the IS group used mustard gas last week in a rocket launched against US soldiers at a base near Qayyarah, a northern town in Iraq considered strategic for retaking Mosul. The base is in the process of being transformed into a logistics hub to support the Mosul offensive. US officials estimate that Iraqi forces could be technically ready to launch the attack in early October. All US soldiers in Iraq who may be exposed to IS chemical arms have received training and the necessary protective equipment, Davis noted.

“They have practiced it many, many times before they will ever get to a place like Qayyarah West where they could encounter it,” he said. The United States also has provided more than 50,000 gas masks to the Iraqi forces, he said. “We want to make sure that the Iraqi security forces and the Peshmergas (Kurdish fighters) have the ability to detect this and to defend against it,” he said. According to the Pentagon, the jihadists are making the mustard gas, and not taking it from the former stockpiles of the Iraqi or Syrian armies. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies remain extremely concerned that violent extremists will eventually flow out of Syria and Iraq and into other countries in hopes of committing attacks, FBI Director James Comey told Congress on Tuesday.

The number of Americans traveling to Syria to fight alongside the Islamic State group has slowed to a trickle in the last year, but as the so-called caliphate becomes “crushed,” many militants from Western nations who are already there will stream out of the region and create new security threats. “There will be a terrorist diaspora sometime in the next two to five years like we’ve never seen before,” Comey said in testimony before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.

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