In a move that Pentagon officials say is a precautionary measure, the roughly 3,500 US ground troops in Iraq have been ordered to prepare themselves to use chemical weapons suits in the event that ISIS forces attack them with their growing arsenal.
ISIS has been bragging about its chemical weapons capacity for quite some time, but it is only relatively recently that the US has started to take notice of incidents in which ISIS has used a “mustard agent” against Kurdish forces across northern Iraq.
Though the attacks have caused relatively few casualties, there are an increasing number of incidents involving them, and with the US making much of deploying their “advisers” near ISIS forces, this is liable to make them convenient targets of opportunity.
The Pentagon insists that the US troops there are equipped and trained to handle being attacked by chemical munitions, but if such an incident were to happen involving US troops it would almost certainly dramatically undercut their claims that the war is going well.
