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Well… I can’t say I’m surprised. If you believe you are living in an apocalyptic end time and that a battle between good and evil is raging, and that anything short of the complete annihilation of Western powers will cause your world to come to an end (or whatever the dick ISIS believes), you are probably going to pursue any means possible to achieve your ends.
Which … doesn’t make this any less douche.
That’s right. I just called ISIS douches. Take that.
We already reported that Islamic State was attempting to acquire nuclear material for a dirty bomb. Now, intelligence officials believe they are actively and aggressively attempting to build chemical and biological weapons. From the Associated Press:
The Islamic State group is aggressively pursuing development of chemical weapons, setting up a branch dedicated to research and experiments with the help of scientists from Iraq, Syria and elsewhere in the region, according to Iraqi and U.S. intelligence officials.
Iraqi officials expressed concern that the large safe haven the extremists control since overrunning parts of Iraq and Syria last year has left Iraqi authorities largely in the dark over the IS program.
Since ISIS has been allowed to operate pretty much with impunity in large areas, they most certainly could be hiding any attempts to build WMDs. Even worse, the group’s inherently sadistic tilt has attracted a whole range of nefarious characters who wouldn’t mind a playground to create chemical and biological weapons.
IS has set up a branch tasked with pursuing chemical weapons, according to a senior Iraqi military intelligence officer and two officials from another Iraqi intelligence agency. They wouldn’t give details of the program, including how many personnel it is believed to have or its budget.
But [Hakim al-Zamili, the head of the Iraqi parliament’s security and defense committee], citing intelligence reports he has access to, told the AP that the group has managed to attract chemical experts from abroad as well as Iraqi experts, including ones who once worked for Saddam Hussein’s now-dissolved Military Industrialization Authority. The foreigners include experts from Chechnya and southeast Asia, the Iraqi intelligence officials said.
IS recently moved its research labs, experts and materials from Iraq to “secured locations” inside Syria, al-Zamili added — apparently out of concern of an eventual assault on Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, captured by IS in the summer of 2014.
U.S. officials, however, remain confident that ISIS currently does not have the ability to produce weapons that could be used in a mass attack.
U.S. intelligence officials don’t believe IS has the capability to develop sophisticated weapons like nerve gas that are most suited for a terrorist attack on a civilian target.
[They] don’t believe IS has the technological capability to produce nerve gas or biological agents, and that the militants were more likely to harm themselves trying to make them.
Now that would be karmically beautiful. Minus all the terrible possible collateral.
God, these people are fucking nuts.