The mostly Sunni Muslim Naqshbandi movement – which has links to Saddam Hussein’s former ruling Baath party - calls for an ongoing resistance against a “Safavid” occupation of Iraq (a reference to the historic Iranian dynasty and therefore, Iraq's Shiite-led government with links to Iran).
Still, the biggest question the incident brings up is: where did the extremists get supplies to make these gases? As the UK newspaper, The Telegraph wrote: “The Iraqi government's claims have not been independently verified. The country was famously found to have no chemical weapons in the aftermath of the Anglo-American invasion in 2003. How al-Qaeda would have obtained the materials to make these devices inside Iraq is unclear.”
The Defence Ministry’s bold news also came after nearly a month of escalating conflict, with over 1,000 Iraqis killed in terrorist attacks in May.
Kurdish MP, Shwan Mohammed Taha, who is also a member of the Iraqi Parliament's Security and Defence Committee, noted that his committee could not confirm whether or not Al Qaeda definitely had chemical weapons. “But the statement by the Ministry of Defence is very dangerous,” Taha said. “If it’s true that Al Qaeda have weapons then the security in the region is severely endangered. And if it’s not true then the government is using false information for scaremongering – as usual.”
Another change that Al Qaeda has made is to release a headline grabbing statement saying that they had met tribal leaders in the predominantly Sunni Muslim province of Anbar and that the two groups had agreed on the importance of confronting “the Safavid Gestapo in Iraq”. By this, they mean the alleged Iranian secret police.
The statement said that those who had attended the meeting had agreed that jihadists should be deployed to confront “the fascists” and also stated that “the conflict with fascism is moving to a stage that will certainly be able to completely change the balance of power”.
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