Three suicide bombers driving chlorine-laden trucks struck in the Sunni insurgent stronghold of Anbar province, killing two policemen and forcing about 350 Iraqi civilians and six U.S. troops to seek treatment for exposure to the gas, the military said Saturday.
The attacks came after back-to-back bombings last month released chlorine gas, prompting the U.S. military to warn that insurgents are adopting new tactics in a campaign to spread panic.
Just after 4 p.m. Friday, a driver detonated explosives in a pickup truck northeast of Ramadi, wounding one U.S. service member and one Iraqi civilian, the military said in a statement.
That was followed by a similar explosion involving a dump truck south of Fallujah in Amiriyah that killed two policemen and left as many as 100 local citizens showing signs of chlorine exposure, with symptoms ranging from minor skin and lung irritations to vomiting, the military said.
Less than 10 miles away, another suicide bomber detonated a dump truck containing a 200-gallon chlorine tank rigged with explosives at 7:13 p.m., also south of Fallujah in the Albu Issa tribal region, the military said. U.S. forces responded to the attack and found about 250 local civilians, including seven children, suffering from symptoms related to chlorine exposure, according to the statement.
Our enemies are pretty sick monsters. The idea that they would go back to college and finish their accounting degree if only we'd leave Iraq is juvenile. And if the fact that we've liberated Iraqis from the thug Saddam and given them the chance for democracy has angered a number of Moslems, that is all the more reason to kill them.
But remember that gas is a terror weapon. Whether in World War I or the Iran-Iraq War, the use of gas killed a very tiny proportion of the total killed in those wars. Notice that in these statistics, few died while many were injured. I assume most of the injured will walk out of the hospitals.
Explosions disperse the gas and in the open wind carries it away. That is why it isn't that effective of a battlefield weapon. Though all suited up you are more likely to die from conventional weapons because you can't see or hear what is going on around you.
Our injured troops this year are probably the first injured by poison gas since the Bari disaster in World War II (where the German aircraft hit a ship carrying mustard gas in the port--which we kept on hand in case the Germans used gas--that spread into the town).
The use of gas will harden the Iraqis against the jihadis--especially the Kurds who were gassed by Saddam's forces in large numbers.
Even Sunni Arabs in central Iraq may finally get with the program and earn some credit with the Kurds and Shias by actively fighting the jihadis.
I have to believe that many Iranians will recoil from this sight given the number of Iranian soldiers who were hit by gas attacks in the 1980s. Will the mullah government's support for those monsters disgust enough Iranians?
Also consider that since the death tolls are lower with gas attacks, the standard press metric of measuring Iraqi casualties will go down if such attacks replace conventional bomb attacks.
Americans seeing our enemies using gas attacks may wonder just who in Iraq provided the expertise to fashion these home-made gas bombs. Fighting the enemy over there rather than over here may again be seen as the wise course of action that it is.
So while our enemies show they are disgusting pieces of living garbage who must be killed wherever we find them, this tactic should backfire on them on a number of fronts.
UPDATE: The attacks (tip to Instapundit) were directed against pro-government Sunni Arabs.
Will the Sunni Arabs of central Iraq be affected by the atrocities carried out on fellow Sunni Arabs by those who they stand with?
