People’s Defence Forces (HPG) commander Murat Karayılan detailed the group’s accusations against Turkey in it’s use of chemical weapons, saying Turkish troops used five types of banned chemicals in military operations in Turkey and Iraq against the Kurdish fighters.
The first is a nerve gas that “kills quickly”, by paralysing the body, Karayılan said in an interview journalist Fehim Işık published on Twitter. “The formal name of this chemical is Tabun.”
The second agent has been known to cause suffocation, and the HPG has identified the chemical as Green Cross, a World War I era chemical consisting mostly of the highly toxic chlorine gas, according to Karayılan.
The HPG has identified another chemical to be sulphur mustard gas, an incendiary agent that was also first manufactured in Germany.
“It gives out a yellow smoke that burns on contact.” Karayılan said.
The fourth chemical the group has identified is a paralytic agent, and the fifth is a pepper spray/tear gas, the HPG commander said.
“These bits of information were provided some months ago,” Işık said as he posted the video. “Of course these scenes would inevitably be made public. How long will these crimes continue?”
Kurdish forces have long accused Turkey of using banned munitions and chemical weapons against the Kurdish guerrilla fighters, particularly in its cross-border operations in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI). In a video HPG published earlier in the week, two of the group’s members appear to be affected by unidentified substances.
In one of the videos, a female HPG guerrilla fighter is seen rambling nonsensically and hysterical, while another male guerrilla fighters appears to be convulsing and having trouble breathing, with his eyes rolled back and muscles in extreme spasm. The group has also released footage of soldiers at the mouth of a cave with a device that it says was used to deliver the chemical agents. A yellow-tinted smoke is seen rising from the cave as soldiers quickly depart.
Dr Gisela Penteker of the Nobel peace prize winning organisation, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) told Medya News in an interview that there were signs of Turkey using chemical agents in KRI, and called for further investigation by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).
