.
Based on recent statements from U.S. Pentagon and Defense Department officials, it seems we might soon be able to add chemical weapons to the beheadings and pyres that have characterized the havoc unleashed by ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Senior U.S. officials report that ISIS forces used mustard gas on August 11, 2015 against Kurdish Peshmerga fighters in the region, potentially giving the religious extremist group a new advantage in the battlefield against their principal rivals. Although mustard gas is not as dangerous as Sarin, VX or other nerve agents and requires high concentrations to be lethal, the use of this banned poison gas serves as yet another test of the international community’s resolve to uphold moral norms and standards of warfare.
The most recent attack follows months of accusations by the Kurdistan Regional Security Council of ISIS chemical attacks dating back to January 2015. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, based in the Hague, and the U.S. State Department's Arms Control, Verification and Compliance Bureau continue the process of verifying the type and source of the poison gas allegedly used by ISIS. We need to ask how an illegal weapon that has been deemed morally reprehensible first arrived in the region and is gradually becoming a normal part of warfare in the Middle East.
When fleeing Rommel’s Afrika Korps across the North African desert in 1942, British units left behind a stash of poison gas artillery shells. At the hands of Egyptian scientists, these shells were retrofitted from teargas grenades to missiles, constituting the first ad hoc components of Egypt’s chemical weapons program nearly two decades later. When intervening in the North Yemen Civil War in 1963, Egypt first introduced chemical weapons to the region’s conflicts by dropping missiles on an unsuspecting North Yemeni villages which had joined the rebellion against the Egyptian-supported Yemeni republic. World opinion was relatively silent, citing the meager size of the first attacks and the opinion that teargas was not in the category of illegal asphyxiating and deadly gases. The absence of a censure of these initial chemical weapons experiments led Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser to believe that the international community would be reluctant to enforce their own taboo against more advanced chemical weapons. The politics of poison gas have since played a deleterious role in the region’s history of conflicts.
With the guidance of former Nazi German munitions experts, Nasser expanded Egypt’s chemical weapons program to include the production of mustard gas, chlorine, phosgene, and according to several intelligence estimates, even advanced nerve agents. A short four years later, Egypt deployed this new class of weapons in January 1967 on the small northern Yemeni village of Kitaf, located within the vicinity of the Yemeni tribal opposition’s cave headquarters.
International media, whose attention had already been drawn to South Arabia by the continuation of hostilities, wasted little time in shining the spotlight and launching full-scale journalistic inquiry into Egypt’s use of chemical weapons, to little impact. In the ensuing months of conflict, Nasser authorized the use of poison gas bombs in a dozen other instances, contributing to the mounting Yemeni death toll and the psychological trauma of civilians who feared dying from the unseen. Separate investigations were conducted by teams of scientists from the U.S., Britain and the International Red Cross all confirming the presence of illegal poison gas in the field samples obtained in Yemen. Despite these multiple levels of scientific and medical verification, however, no Western country was willing to lead a censure of Egypt’s chemical war.
The U.S. was mired in the defense of its own chemical war in Vietnam and feared appearing hypocritical by censuring Egypt while condoning their own use of herbicides and teargas. Britain was fixated on remaking its post-Empire image and was afraid that the Arab World would accuse the former empire of being imperialistic. Norway, Sweden and Denmark, the countries most associated with serving humanitarian causes were not willing to endanger their economic interests in Egypt and the safe passage of their shipping through the Suez Canal by censuring Nasser’s chemical war.
Even the United Nations and the International Red Cross hid behind bureaucratic formalities as a way to avoid confronting Egypt. Secretary General U Thant claimed a UN “catch-22”: an inability to launch an investigation of Egypt’s chemical war in Yemen without an official request from a member nation, knowing full well that no country would lead an international censure of Egypt. Andre Rochat, the head of the Red Cross mission to Yemen conducted a full investigation, but refused to release the results to the public, fearing this might compromise the neutrality of the organization and Egypt would then evict his fledgling mission from South Arabia.
During the 1960s, Nasser realized that there were limits to the international community’s standards of morality in warfare and it was unlikely Egypt would ever be held accountable for using poison gas in Yemen. There were several countries watching events surrounding the chemical war in Yemen with a keen personal interest. Israeli military authorities and civilians were particularly alarmed by Egypt’s unchecked use of poison gas against Yemeni civilians, fearing that similar bombs would be dropped on the streets of Tel Aviv. This factored into Israel’s strategic decision to preemptively strike the Egyptian air force, thereby diminishing Nasser’s ability to deliver chemical weapons.
While the international community’s failure to uphold the poison gas taboo contributed to the outbreak of the 1967 War between Israel and Egypt, it also served as good advertising for Egypt’s emerging chemical weapons industry. Other regional powers saw Nasser’s unpunished use of poison gas in Yemen as a potential asset to their own military resources. While nuclear weapons were expensive and tightly controlled, chemical weapons were relatively easy to manufacture and evidently not strictly banned by the norms of warfare. During the 1970s, Egyptian scientists aided Saddam Hussein’s growing chemical industry in the years leading up to Iraq’s use of chemical weapons against Iran and the Iraqi Kurds ten years later. Prior to the 1973 Yom Kippur with Israel, Syria purchased chemical weapons from Egypt and employed Egyptian scientists to establish their own chemical weapons industry, the products of which Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used against Syrian rebels in 2013.
Four decades after Nasser launched his first chemical attack in 1963, Assad demonstrated his own defiance of illegal practices of warfare by challenging President Obama’s “red line” warnings. Assad revealed once again that global opposition to poison gas is limited to grandiose rhetoric alone as the political and economic costs of a more forceful reaction are too high. In August 2013, Assad launched a major attack using lethal Sarin nerve gas against densely population Syrian rebel-held areas north of the city of Damascus. The nearly 1,500 casualties recorded by U.S. intelligence officials surprised many, but did not produce the threatened bombing campaign against Assad’s regime. U.S. officials continue to express concern that despite an international effort to rid Syria of its chemical weapons, Assad may be retaining a cache of chemical bombs as a weapon of last resort to forestall an attack by Syrian rebels. The suspected ISIS deployment of poison gas only serves to further emphasize the underlying weakness in global response to immoral war practices. The international community’s silence in the face of chemical weapons in Yemen during the 1960s exposed the falsehood of the poison gas taboo and the tenuous nature of international morality. In the ensuing decades, chemical weapons have been used with greater frequency and ferocity. Rather than a seldom-used illegal weapon, poison gas is emerging as a norm of warfare in the Middle East.
Asher Orkaby, PhD is a research fellow at the Harvard University NELC Department and the author of a forthcoming book, The International History of the Yemen Civil War.
The views presented in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of any other organization.
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The Tenuous Taboo: Egypt, ISIS, and Chemical Weapons in the Middle East
October 7, 2015
Based on recent statements from U.S. Pentagon and Defense Department officials, it seems we might soon be able to add chemical weapons to the beheadings and pyres that have characterized the havoc unleashed by ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Senior U.S. officials report that ISIS forces used mustard gas on August 11, 2015 against Kurdish Peshmerga fighters in the region, potentially giving the religious extremist group a new advantage in the battlefield against their principal rivals. Although mustard gas is not as dangerous as Sarin, VX or other nerve agents and requires high concentrations to be lethal, the use of this banned poison gas serves as yet another test of the international community’s resolve to uphold moral norms and standards of warfare.
The most recent attack follows months of accusations by the Kurdistan Regional Security Council of ISIS chemical attacks dating back to January 2015. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, based in the Hague, and the U.S. State Department's Arms Control, Verification and Compliance Bureau continue the process of verifying the type and source of the poison gas allegedly used by ISIS. We need to ask how an illegal weapon that has been deemed morally reprehensible first arrived in the region and is gradually becoming a normal part of warfare in the Middle East.
When fleeing Rommel’s Afrika Korps across the North African desert in 1942, British units left behind a stash of poison gas artillery shells. At the hands of Egyptian scientists, these shells were retrofitted from teargas grenades to missiles, constituting the first ad hoc components of Egypt’s chemical weapons program nearly two decades later. When intervening in the North Yemen Civil War in 1963, Egypt first introduced chemical weapons to the region’s conflicts by dropping missiles on an unsuspecting North Yemeni villages which had joined the rebellion against the Egyptian-supported Yemeni republic. World opinion was relatively silent, citing the meager size of the first attacks and the opinion that teargas was not in the category of illegal asphyxiating and deadly gases. The absence of a censure of these initial chemical weapons experiments led Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser to believe that the international community would be reluctant to enforce their own taboo against more advanced chemical weapons. The politics of poison gas have since played a deleterious role in the region’s history of conflicts.
With the guidance of former Nazi German munitions experts, Nasser expanded Egypt’s chemical weapons program to include the production of mustard gas, chlorine, phosgene, and according to several intelligence estimates, even advanced nerve agents. A short four years later, Egypt deployed this new class of weapons in January 1967 on the small northern Yemeni village of Kitaf, located within the vicinity of the Yemeni tribal opposition’s cave headquarters.
International media, whose attention had already been drawn to South Arabia by the continuation of hostilities, wasted little time in shining the spotlight and launching full-scale journalistic inquiry into Egypt’s use of chemical weapons, to little impact. In the ensuing months of conflict, Nasser authorized the use of poison gas bombs in a dozen other instances, contributing to the mounting Yemeni death toll and the psychological trauma of civilians who feared dying from the unseen. Separate investigations were conducted by teams of scientists from the U.S., Britain and the International Red Cross all confirming the presence of illegal poison gas in the field samples obtained in Yemen. Despite these multiple levels of scientific and medical verification, however, no Western country was willing to lead a censure of Egypt’s chemical war.
The U.S. was mired in the defense of its own chemical war in Vietnam and feared appearing hypocritical by censuring Egypt while condoning their own use of herbicides and teargas. Britain was fixated on remaking its post-Empire image and was afraid that the Arab World would accuse the former empire of being imperialistic. Norway, Sweden and Denmark, the countries most associated with serving humanitarian causes were not willing to endanger their economic interests in Egypt and the safe passage of their shipping through the Suez Canal by censuring Nasser’s chemical war.
Even the United Nations and the International Red Cross hid behind bureaucratic formalities as a way to avoid confronting Egypt. Secretary General U Thant claimed a UN “catch-22”: an inability to launch an investigation of Egypt’s chemical war in Yemen without an official request from a member nation, knowing full well that no country would lead an international censure of Egypt. Andre Rochat, the head of the Red Cross mission to Yemen conducted a full investigation, but refused to release the results to the public, fearing this might compromise the neutrality of the organization and Egypt would then evict his fledgling mission from South Arabia.
During the 1960s, Nasser realized that there were limits to the international community’s standards of morality in warfare and it was unlikely Egypt would ever be held accountable for using poison gas in Yemen. There were several countries watching events surrounding the chemical war in Yemen with a keen personal interest. Israeli military authorities and civilians were particularly alarmed by Egypt’s unchecked use of poison gas against Yemeni civilians, fearing that similar bombs would be dropped on the streets of Tel Aviv. This factored into Israel’s strategic decision to preemptively strike the Egyptian air force, thereby diminishing Nasser’s ability to deliver chemical weapons.
While the international community’s failure to uphold the poison gas taboo contributed to the outbreak of the 1967 War between Israel and Egypt, it also served as good advertising for Egypt’s emerging chemical weapons industry. Other regional powers saw Nasser’s unpunished use of poison gas in Yemen as a potential asset to their own military resources. While nuclear weapons were expensive and tightly controlled, chemical weapons were relatively easy to manufacture and evidently not strictly banned by the norms of warfare. During the 1970s, Egyptian scientists aided Saddam Hussein’s growing chemical industry in the years leading up to Iraq’s use of chemical weapons against Iran and the Iraqi Kurds ten years later. Prior to the 1973 Yom Kippur with Israel, Syria purchased chemical weapons from Egypt and employed Egyptian scientists to establish their own chemical weapons industry, the products of which Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used against Syrian rebels in 2013.
Four decades after Nasser launched his first chemical attack in 1963, Assad demonstrated his own defiance of illegal practices of warfare by challenging President Obama’s “red line” warnings. Assad revealed once again that global opposition to poison gas is limited to grandiose rhetoric alone as the political and economic costs of a more forceful reaction are too high. In August 2013, Assad launched a major attack using lethal Sarin nerve gas against densely population Syrian rebel-held areas north of the city of Damascus. The nearly 1,500 casualties recorded by U.S. intelligence officials surprised many, but did not produce the threatened bombing campaign against Assad’s regime. U.S. officials continue to express concern that despite an international effort to rid Syria of its chemical weapons, Assad may be retaining a cache of chemical bombs as a weapon of last resort to forestall an attack by Syrian rebels. The suspected ISIS deployment of poison gas only serves to further emphasize the underlying weakness in global response to immoral war practices. The international community’s silence in the face of chemical weapons in Yemen during the 1960s exposed the falsehood of the poison gas taboo and the tenuous nature of international morality. In the ensuing decades, chemical weapons have been used with greater frequency and ferocity. Rather than a seldom-used illegal weapon, poison gas is emerging as a norm of warfare in the Middle East.
Asher Orkaby, PhD is a research fellow at the Harvard University NELC Department and the author of a forthcoming book, The International History of the Yemen Civil War.
The views presented in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of any other organization.
