The New Nuclear Terrorism
On Thursday the Islamic State again targeted the Iraqi capital of Baghdad.
The Jihadist terror organization staged two suicide bombings that took the lives of at least 31 people.
The deadliest attack targeted the market of a Shiite neighborhood, the favorite target of ISIS in Baghdad. Nineteen people died, and another 46 were wounded when a suicide bomber detonated his explosive device in a crowd of people.
Another 12 people were murdered and 32 were injured when a suicide bomber drove his car bomb into an Army checkpoint north of Baghdad.
Ján Kubiš, the U.N. special envoy to Iraq said in a statement the attacks were “cowardly acts that not only aim at inflicting a heavy toll on the civilian population but also seek to weaken the country’s unity and destroy its social fabric.”
He added that the “Islamic State should not be allowed to succeed.”
The increase in terror attacks in Iraq could be only the beginning of a much larger terror campaign now that ISIS is facing mounting battle losses in Syria, Iraq and Libya where government forces have now reportedly entered the Islamic State’s stronghold, Sirte.
This terror campaign could very well involve weapons of mass destruction including nuclear weapons reports the International Luxembourg Forum On Preventing Nuclear Catastrophe.
The Forum says that the threat of a nuclear attack is the highest since the Cold War.
“ISIS has already carried out numerous chemical weapons attacks in Syria; we know it wants to go further by carrying out a nuclear attack in the heart of Europe. This, combined with poor levels of security at a host of nuclear research centers in the former Soviet Union mean the threat of a possible ‘dirty-bomb’ attack on a Western capital is high,” Viatcheslav Kantor, the President of the Luxembourg Forum, told the Independent.
Kantor told a conference in Amsterdam on Thursday that the terrorists who carried out the attack on Zaventem International Airport in Brussels, Belgium at the end of March had been monitoring a Belgian nuclear facility.
“Their previous documented attempts to gain access to a nuclear power station in Belgium are evidence of their intent. The terrorists don’t necessarily have to use a ‘dirty bomb.’ We are not just talking about stolen nuclear material, using conventional explosives in a nuclear plant, such as smuggling in a bomb, would have catastrophic consequences,” Kantor told the attendants of the conference.
Des Browne, who is a former British Defense Secretary and is now the vice-chairman of the Nuclear Threat Initiative and a member of the Luxembourg Forum, said that ISIS could be working on a dirty bomb. He also said the Islamic State has seized uranium isotopes during the conquest of Mosul in Iraq.
“It isn’t that hard to build a ‘dirty bomb.’ They may not kill that many people with such a bomb, but the effect on the environment, the infrastructure and the psychological impact on people would be devastating. They can also use cyber warfare to target a nuclear facility,” Browne told the conference.
It was the second time in less than a year that experts warned ISIS is likely working on a dirty bomb.
Western Journalism reported in June 2015 that according to Australian intelligence, the Islamic State was in the possession of enough radioactive material to build a large and devastating dirty bomb.
The nuclear material needed for the bomb was likely obtained in Iraq and in Syria where eyewitnesses reported that ISIS was digging at the site that once housed the Syrian nuclear reactor in Deir a-Zur. This secret Syrian nuclear reactor at Al-Kibar in Deir a-Zur was destroyed in 2007 by the Israeli Air Force in a spectacular raid called Mivtza Bustan.
At the end of last year it was revealed that smugglers with ties to the Russian mafia in Moldova had intended to sell nuclear material to terrorist groups, including the Islamic State. The attempts were foiled after the Moldovan authorities revealed they had discovered that the criminals exploited “a breakdown in cooperation between Russia and the West on security issues.”
The alarming news about ISIS’ attempts to obtain a nuclear weapon or to launch a bomb attack on a nuclear facility came the same day the Federal Criminal Office in Germany warned for an impending ISIS WMD attack on crowds at the Euro 2016 soccer tournament that will start Friday.
The German FBI warned that ISIS could use flying drone bombs packed with chemical agents to wreak havoc during the tournament. The threat has already resulted in the establishment of no-fly zones in the vicinity of French stadiums where the matches will take place.
The Mirror reported, “In the past two years there have been dozens of illegal drone flyovers at sensitive nuclear and military plants in France.” It remains unclear who carried out the drone flights but it could be that they were related to ISIS’ plans to carry out a mega terrorist attack in Europe.
