Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government said on Saturday it has evidence the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) used chlorine gas as a chemical weapon.

Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government said on Saturday it has evidence the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) used chlorine gas as a chemical weapon against Kurdish peshmerga forces, according to Reuters news agency.

The Kurdish region’s Security Council said in a statement that a laboratory analysis of soil and clothing samples from a January suicide car bombing it said ISIS conducted in northern Iraq found “the samples contained levels of chlorine that suggested the substance was used in weaponries form.”

Chlorine is a choking agent whose use as a chemical weapon dates back to World War One.

It is banned under the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention, which prohibits all use of toxic agents on the battlefield.

The Kurdish allegation could not be independently confirmed.

Peter Sawczak, spokesman for the Dutch-based Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, said: “We have not had a request from Iraq to investigate claims of use of chemical weapons in Iraq, and the OPCW cannot immediately verify the claims.”

Chlorine has been used “systematically” in the civil war in neighboring Syria, an OPCW fact-finding mission found last year.

The OPCW would have to get its own samples to confirm the use of chemical weapons in a member state.

The Kurdish statement said the Jan. 23 suicide car bombing by ISIS took place on a highway between Mosul and the Syrian border. A Kurdish security source said that the Peshmerga fired a rocket at the car carrying the bomb so there were no casualties from the incident except for the suicide

About a dozen Peshmerga fighters experienced symptoms of nausea, vomiting, dizziness or weakness, the source said.

The statement said the analysis was carried out in a European Union-certified laboratory after the soil and samples were sent by the Kurdish Regional Government to a “partner nation” in the U.S.-led coalition that is fighting ISIS militants in Iraq and Syria.

The source described the samples as “leftovers from the suicide bomber”, but declined to identify the laboratory.

Iraq’s Kurds were the victims of the deadliest chemical attack of modern times when Saddam Hussein’s air force bombed the town of Halabja in 1988, gassing at least 5,000 people to death.

Weapons expert killed

The U.S. Central Command said on Jan. 30 that an ISIS chemical weapons expert had been killed in a coalition air strike six days earlier near Mosul – the day after the car bombing cited in Saturday’s statement.

The expert, Abu Malik, had been a chemical weapons engineer during the rule of Saddam Hussein and then affiliated himself with Al-Qaeda in Iraq in 2005, Central Command said at the time.

When he joined ISIS, it gave the insurgent force a chemical weapons capability, it added. The Pentagon in Washington had no comment on Saturday’s Kurdish statement.

Western diplomats in The Hague, where the OPCW is based, have long feared ISIS fighters would get their hands on chemical weapons. It is not easy to make such weapons and ISIS tried to recruit experts when it took over Mosul last year, diplomatic sources told Reuters. They were not believed to have been successful.

Kurdish forces, backed by U.S.-led air strikes, have taken a prominent role in fighting the ISIS militants who last year declared a cross-border caliphate after seizing land in eastern Syria and northern Iraq.

No international organization has documented the use of chemical weapons on Iraqi territory in the war with ISIS.

The Kurdish authorities said in their statement they had “long suspected that (ISIS) fighters have been using chemical agents” and cited video footage from recent battles around the city of Tikrit between the militants and Iraqi troops and allied Shi’ite militias where “plumes of orange smoke” were visible.

Reuters was also e-mailed video footage and photos of what the Kurdish Security Council identified as images from the Jan. 23 attack. Among the photos were several of canisters lying on the ground that the council says were found at the site and contained chlorine.

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