If beheading, rape, and sexual slavery are not enough, now an international poison gas monitoring group confirms that members of the Islamic State have attacked Kurdish forces with mustard gas.
The mustard gas was used last August against Peshmerga troops in Iraq.
The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) tested soil samples after 35 Kurdish fighters fell ill on the battlefield. Those samples tested positive for sulfur mustard.
It wasn't the first time the Kurds had been poisoned en masse. In March, 1988 Saddam Hussein used mustard gas against them in the city of Halabja. The Kurds told me that at least 5,000 innocent civilians were killed during that attack, a day they call Bloody Friday. 10,000 people were injured.
You can watch archive video of the 1988 Halabja attack here: (Warning, Graphic!)
So, it is now confirmed: Iraqi Kurds are victims of another poison gas attack. This time, possibly initiated by some of the same people involved in the Halabja attack of 28 years ago. That's because some of the same Sunnis who led the fight against the Kurds during the Saddam era have joined ISIS.
And while Donald Trump and the Republican presidential candidates debate whether or not Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass detruction during the time of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, we now know that some Iraqi WMDs--in this case mustard gas--may have fallen into the hands of ISIS.
Did ISIS seize the chemical weapons in Iraq, or from Assad's stockpiles in Syria? We don't know how, or from where they obtained them. But we do know ISIS has chemical weapons, and has not hesitated to use them.
The tragic, inhumane use of mustard gas against the Kurds may serve as a warning to America. Might ISIS agents cross the porous Mexican border and bring WMDs into the United States for use against innocents here?
CIA DIrector John Brennan and National Intelligence Director James Clapper have also confirmed the ISIS use of chemical weapons in both Syria and Iraq. They are extremely concerned about the possibility of a poison gas attack here in the USA.
We should be, too.