Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop issued a warning that said the Islamic State (IS) terrorist group is recruiting experts to develop chemical weapons.
"The use of chlorine by Daesh [IS] and its recruitment of highly technically trained professionals, including from the West, have revealed far more serious efforts in chemical weapons development," Bishop said Friday in a speech to Australia Group members in Perth.
In the speech, Bishop said the rise of global terror groups posed one of the gravest security threats people face today. Australia Group is an informal grouping of countries committed to prevent the export of chemical weapon-making materials.
"Apart from some crude and small scale endeavours, the conventional wisdom has been that the terrorist intention to acquire and weaponise chemical agents has been largely aspirational," she said. "Daesh is likely to have amongst its tens of thousands of recruits the technical expertise necessary to further refine precursor materials and build chemical weapons."
Bishop is not first person to claim that Islamic State has chemical weapon power. A few months back, the Kurdistan regional government in Iraq claimed that it had evidence IS used chlorine gas against Kurdish peshmerga forces in January, according to the AFP.
The international group Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has been looking into allegations of dozens of recent chlorine gas attacks in Syrian villages, according to Reuters. However, Syrian President Bashar Assad's government refused investigators access to the gas-attacked villages.
"The fact that atrocities such as this continue to occur shows that we must remain vigilant to the threat of chemical and biological weapons," said Bishop.
