The U.S. this week bombed a suspected chemical weapons factory in Syria in order to keep increasingly desperate Islamic State fighters from using them on the battlefield, as U.S.-backed Syrian rebels continue to gain ground in the battle to liberate Raqqa.
“We know that ISIS has proven in Iraq that they are willing to use chemical weapons,” said Col. Ryan Dillon, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad.
“We have not seen the use of chemical weapons in Syria, but we don’t want to wait for them to use it either,” Dillon said at a Pentagon briefing Thursday.
The U.S.-led coalition says it destroyed the factory near Dayr Az Zawr during an airstrike Monday, as well as nearby oil stills and storage facilities.
The suspected ISIS chemical weapons factory was stockpiling industrial chemicals, not sophisticated nerve agents such as Sarin. To the extent ISIS has been able to fashion chemical weapons, they have been crude, and generally ineffective.
“Largely, they have been rudimentary and have not had a significant effect on the overall campaign,” Dillon said.
The chemicals involved were more in the class of irritants than deadly gas. Dillon described them as “largely industrial-type ingredients, nothing that causes so much concern for us.”
Still, Dillon says whenever the U.S. identifies a suspected chemical weapons facility, it will take action. “We do not want them to get good at this,” Dillon said. “So any time that we find or know that ISIS has stockpiles or have put together anything that can be used to make these weapons, we will strike them.”
Two months into the campaign to liberate Raqqa from the grip of ISIS, just over 45 percent of the city is now under the control of the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces.
Dillon says the fighters remaining in the city are surrounded with no way to escape. “Their chances of leaving are very low. Their chances of dying … are very high,” Dillon said.
