Alarmed by the threat, US officials launched an operation in 2015 to kill the terror group’s key weapons expert
July 11, 2022 at 4:00 pm EDT Islamic State forces march with an Iraqi security forces armored vehicle in Mosul in 2014. (Associated Press) Comment on this story Comment In the summer of 2014, as his followers were ravaging the cities of northern Iraq, Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi called a secret meeting with a weapons expert whose unusual skills the terrorist leader wanted to acquire. His guest was a small man, just 5 feet tall, who had only recently been released from a multi-year stint in US and Iraqi prisons. But before that, Salih al-Sabawi was an Iraqi official with some notoriety: a Russian-trained engineer who had once helped President Saddam Hussein build his extensive arsenal of chemical weapons. Baghdadi had called Sabawi, 52, to offer him a job. If given the right equipment and resources, could it produce the same weapons for the Islamic State? Sabawi’s answer, according to a later intelligence report on the meeting, was yes. It could do this and more. Thus began what American and Iraqi Kurdish officials describe as a smash-and-grab effort to build the largest arsenal of chemical and, possibly, biological weapons ever assembled by a terrorist group. Within six months, under Sabawi’s direction, the Islamic State would develop mustard gas, a World War I-era chemical weapon, as well as chlorine-filled bombs and rockets. However, Sabawi’s ambitions, and by extension Baghdadi’s, were much broader, according to newly revealed evidence about the Islamic State’s weapons program. Iraqi Kurdish intelligence reports seen by the Washington Post shed new light on the role played by Sabawi, a mysterious figure in the Abu Malik terror group, and on the Islamic State leaders’ ambitious plan to develop and use weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and abroad. New insights are also emerging from a UN investigation combing through millions of pages of Islamic State files as it looks for evidence of the group’s war crimes. Additionally, several current and former U.S. officials in interviews with The Post spoke for the first time in detail about a hastily planned military operation, conducted in 2015 by U.S. Special Operations forces with the help of Kurdish Peshmerga, to kill Sabawi and crush the weapons. program before it matures. US officials learned through electronic surveillance in 2014 that Sabawi was working to produce powerful new weapons using highly lethal botulism toxin and ricin, while also pursuing plans to make weaponized carbon. Botulinum toxin, a neurotoxin derived from the same bacteria that causes botulism, was explored as a potential weapon by both the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Ricin, a toxin extracted from castor beans, was weaponized by the Soviets and used in political assassinations. Sabawi’s intention, current and former US officials said, was to build a large stockpile consisting of many types chemical and biological agents to be used in military campaigns as well as in terrorist attacks against the major cities of Europe. “They were specifically looking at Western Europe,” said a senior US official familiar with Islamic State operations. Like several other U.S. and Iraqi officials, he spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss details derived from sensitive surveillance operations. “We know they were also interested in US military bases, on the continent or really anywhere,” the official said. “Eventually they would go with the easiest target.” That the Islamic State had manufactured small quantities of chemical weapons has been reported in the past. The terrorist group used chlorine and mustard gas against Kurdish and Iraqi forces nearly 20 times, from early 2015 until the liberation of the Iraqi city of Mosul two years later. Other terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda, have explored the feasibility of developing chemical and biological weapons. But by recruiting Sabawi, the Islamic State had acquired the services of a rare specialist with years of hands-on experience making industrial-sized chemical weapons. IS used captives as test subjects for deadly poisons The US government’s only public reference to Sabawi came in a brief Pentagon statement in 2015 announcing the recent death of a “chemical weapons engineer” named Abu Malik in an airstrike. Few knew at the time of the extent of Shabawi’s experience or his vision to supply Islamic State leaders with terrifying weapons to bolster the group’s terror campaign in Europe. “Had Abu Malik survived, his experience working for Saddam’s program would have greatly increased the threat posed by Islamic State’s chemical weapons,” said Gregory Koblenz, a chemical and biological weapons expert and director of the Biodefense Graduate Program. at the Schar School. in Politics and Governance at George Mason University. “It is very frightening to think what could have happened if the Islamic State had used a chemical weapon, instead of guns and bombs, to carry out one of its attacks in a major European city.” During the 1980s, at the height of Saddam’s reign as Iraq’s powerful leader, the production center for Iraq’s chemical weapons was a huge industrial complex called the Muthanna State Establishment, about 85 miles northwest of Baghdad. Iraqi scientists oversaw the production of at least four types of chemical weapons, which the military directly used in the brutal trench warfare of the Iran-Iraq war. Iraqi chemical bombs and shells were used to kill or injure more than 50,000 Iranians, from frontline soldiers to civilians living in villages and towns along the border. Among the many scientists working at Muthanna was Sabawi, who, according to his intelligence file, took a job at the facility in 1989, aged 28. An army chemical engineer trained in Iraq and the Soviet Union, he worked at the weapons plant until operations ceased with the defeat of the Iraqi army in the first Gulf War in 1991. The death of Abu Bakr Baghdadi was a turning point for the Islamic State By the end of the war, Muthanna was at its peak, its three main factories capable of producing 500 tons of sulfur mustard, commonly called mustard gas, each year, along with smaller amounts of more lethal nerve agents such as tampon, sarin, and VX. Sabawi was specifically involved in the production of mustard gas during the last three years of the plant, according to a file kept by the Counter-Terrorism Department of the Iraqi Kurdish Regional Government. After the war, Sabawi found that his skills as a weapon were no longer needed. The chemical weapons factories in Muthanna were systematically dismantled in the 1990s under UN supervision, and hundreds of tons of the weapons it helped build were destroyed in incinerators or chemically neutralized. Sabawi kept his job in the army and was eventually promoted to brigadier general, but his resentment over the destruction of Iraq’s chemical weapons program appears to have remained. According to the dossier, he joined an insurgent group after the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, allying with Islamic extremists calling themselves al-Qaeda in Iraq. He was arrested in 2005 and spent the next seven years behind bars, first in a US military detention center and then in a civilian-run Iraqi prison. As a former high-ranking army officer, Sabawi maintained important political connections, and intelligence officials said he was eventually able to use those connections to regain his freedom. He was released from prison in 2012, just as his old insurgent group was beginning to regain strength under a new name, the Islamic State of Iraq. It would later be known simply as the Islamic State or ISIS. Iraqi Kurdish officials said Sabawi may have known Baghdadi from his days as a rebel. In any case, the self-proclaimed caliph of the Islamic State became keenly interested in the former gunman after his fighters completed the stunning conquest of Mosul in 2014. This was Baghdadi’s moment of triumph and he was trying to take advantage of it. Having seized vast swaths of Iraq and Syria, he now controlled resources that no terrorist leader had ever possessed: military bases, factories, universities, television stations, Internet servers, and banks filled with millions of dollars in hard currency. With tens of thousands of fighters under his command and more arriving every day, Baghdadi has proclaimed to his followers that the Islamic State would eventually conquer the entire Middle East, while using the threat of mass-casualty terror attacks to dissuade Western countries from intervening . To realize his vision, US officials said, Baghdadi needed special weapons. And Sabawi knew how to make them.
“Emir” of chemical weapons Sabawi’s Kurdish dossier is a dense bundle of documents and reports spanning 10 years, including the brief but intensely busy period when he held the title of emir of Chemical and Biological Weapons Manufacturing for the Islamic State. A mug shot accompanying the file depicts a middle-aged man with cropped hair, a gray beard and brown eyes. Some of the Iraqi specialists who went to work for the Islamic State later claimed they were forced to take jobs or accepted positions because they had no other way to make a living. Instead, a summary document describing Shabawi’s role in the terror group suggests he was an enthusiastic participant who was personally loyal to Baghdadi and was well rewarded for his service. Iraqi prisoner says he helped Islamic State build chemical weapons “He was a high-ranking ISIS official, close to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and responsible for promoting chemical and biological weapons,” the document said. Soon…
