There was another vehicle-bourne IED attack involving chlorine yesterday. From MSNBC:
Insurgents with two chlorine truck bombs attacked a local government building in Fallujah in western Iraq on Wednesday, the latest in a string of attacks using the poisonous gas, the U.S. military said.
Fifteen Iraqi and U.S. soldiers were wounded in the blasts and many more suffered chlorine poisoning, the statement said.
“Numerous Iraqi soldiers and policemen are being treated for symptoms such as labored breathing, nausea, skin irritation and vomiting that are synonymous with chlorine inhalation,” a U.S. statement said.
Last week, the press asked Major General Mike Barbero (J-3, Dep. Dir. Ops) about the chlorine incidents. He assessed them as "relatively ineffective."
Q: You called it "relatively ineffective." It did sicken hundreds of people over the weekend. Do you consider this to be a tool that's going to be of increasing use in Iraq and do you think that it's something that might be exported to Afghanistan?
GEN. BARBERO: We think it will be continued to be exercised in Iraq. The chlorine is readily accessible. And we've had a number of these -- just checking my notes -- you know, over the weekend, we had three suicide bombers detonate trucks loaded with chlorine in Al Anbar province, and since late January, there have been three others, so six within the last few months.
Most of the attacks have been in Al Anbar province. The ones this weekend -- if not all then two of the three were stopped at a security checkpoint, either at a(n) access control point or a coalition checkpoint. And that's why I was saying "ineffective"; they were stopped there and detonated in the vicinity of those.
We expect them to continue. They're going to exploit every opportunity they can to, you know, slaughter innocent Iraqis, and so we expect it to continue.
And that's the point that ought to be made. We don't need to get overly excited about chlorine bombs. The current military mask is all that is needed to protect individuals from exposure to this industrial chemical (see, don't you wish you trained more in the gas chamber now?). As for the Iraqi public, counterinsurgency operations should restrict the ability of insurgents to move around chlorine ton-containers and to use them for their full effect. Easy. Hopefully this will limit any more silly "WMD" talk in relation to these incidents - except by the media, who still wants to compare the release of a few hundred gallons of chlorine to the use of nerve gas during the Iran-Iraq war.
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