US airstrike ‘stopped Isis chemical weapons programme’

An Islamic State plot to use Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons expert to target Europe was foiled by a US drone strike, sources in Washington have said.

Salih al-Sabawi, a senior Iraqi official under Saddam who helped build the dictator’s arsenal of chemical weapons, was recruited to create a stockpile of chemical and biological agents for terrorist attacks in European cities, The Washington Post reported.

The weapons would also have been used for the group’s military campaigns but Sabawi, 52, was killed in a US airstrike in 2015.

The weapons created by Sabawi were to be given to the unit of mainly French and Belgian volunteers who went on to orchestrate the November 2015 Paris attacks, which killed more than 130 people.

“They were specifically looking at western Europe,” an unnamed US official told the newspaper. “We know they were also interested in US military bases, on the continent, or really anywhere. They were ultimately going to go with the easiest target.”

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State leader, provided the Russian-trained engineer with the equipment and resources required to produce the same weapons he had for Saddam years earlier.

In 2014, US and Iraqi Kurdish intelligence discovered that Sabawi was working to produce weaponised anthrax, alongside other weapons using highly lethal botulinum, a neurotoxin, and ricin, a toxin used by the Soviets in political assassinations.

Under Sabawi, who was known within Isis as Abu Malik, the group successfully manufactured mustard gas, a First World War-era chemical weapon, and chlorine-filled bombs.

US special forces, helped by the Kurdish uprising in Iraq, launched an operation in 2015 to cut short the fledgling weapons programme by killing Sabawi, former US officials told the Post.

Washington believed the threat was too acute to wait for the liberation of Mosul, the northern Iraqi city, which did not happen until 2017. In January 2015, the US military struck Sabawi’s car as he drove home from his laboratory at Mosul University.

One of Sabawi’s sons was also killed in the airstrike. Subsequent strikes decimated Sabawi’s network of labs and production centres.

The US government publicly announced the death of a “chemical weapons engineer” named Abu Malik in an airstrike in 2015. Few knew at the time about the extent of Sabawi’s experience or his vision for providing Isis leaders with banned weapons to bolster the group’s terror campaign in Europe.