A "dirty bomb" made out of 88 pounds of radioactive Uranium is allegedly in the possession of Islamic State militants, an ISIS-affiliated Twitter account revealed on Thursday, according to The Mirror.
The explosive was created after ISIS terrorists battled and took over the city of Mosul in June, an ISIS supporter said.
"O by the way Islamic State does have a Dirty bomb. We found Radioactive [sic] material from Mosul University," said the tweet by an ISIS militant who called himself Muslim al-Britani. "We'll find out what dirty bombs are and what they do. We'll also discuss what might happen if one actually went off in a public area."
The uranium, which had gone missing from Mosul University, has reportedly been weaponized and turned into what was described to be a "dirty bomb," a special improvised explosive device consisting of radioactive nuclear waste and conventional explosives, designed to spread hazardous radioactive material over a wide ranging area.
"A dirty bomb set off in an urban area would render at least several blocks off-limits while a lengthy cleanup process ensued," a report from Catholic Online stated. "Imagine if no traffic could pass through Times Square or across the busiest city thoroughfare near you."
"This sort of bomb would be terribly destructive if went off in LONDON becuz it would be more of a disruptive than a destructive weapon," al-Britani claimed, according to Breitbart.
Muslim al-Britani is being used as a pseudonym by Hamayun Tariq, a former British explosives expert, who fled Britain in 2012 after posting bail on terrorism charges and is now believed to be an Islamic State trainer in Syria.
In July, Iraq's UN Ambassador Mohamed Ali Alhakim warned the United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon that "terrorist groups" had stolen nuclear radioactive material previously controlled by the government. It "can be used in manufacturing weapons of mass destruction," he said in a letter.
"These nuclear materials, despite the limited amounts mentioned, can enable terrorist groups, with the availability of the required expertise, to use it separate or in combination with other materials in its terrorist acts," Alhakim stated.
In November, President Barack Obama said that U.S. ground troops will immediately be ordered to engage in a ground battle against the ISIS militants in Syria and Iraq if the terrorist organization ever managed to get a hold of a nuclear weapon.
"If we discovered that [ISIS] had gotten possession of a nuclear weapon, and we had to run an operation to get it out of their hands, then, yes, you can anticipate that not only would Chairman Dempsey [the top U.S. general] recommend me sending U.S. ground troops to get that weapon out of their hands, but I would order it," the Commander-in-Chief told reporters at a news conference in Brisbane, Australia.
Meanwhile, "although ISIS' dirty bomb allegedly contains uranium, the explosive does not categorize as a 'weapon of mass destruction' under U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission standards because the initial blast would be more deadly than the ensuing spread of nuclear material," according to The Christian Post.
"The nuclear material is designed to make the cleanup from the explosion more costly and challenging creating more of a 'disruption.'"
