Daesh terrorists launch chemical attack on eastern Mosul: Cmdr.

A high-ranking Iraqi military commander says Takfiri Daesh terrorists have used internationally-banned chemical weapons in a recent attack on the liberated areas in eastern Mosul as government forces and their allies are pushing to expel the extremists out of the country’s second largest city.

According to Press TV quoting English-language online newspaper Iraqi News, the Commander of the Iraqi Rapid Response Forces, Captain Sa'adon Khaled al-Ramadani, said on Thursday that the extremists lobbed a barrage of Katyusha rockets containing chlorine gas on al-Maliyah, Nabi Yunus and al-Faisaliyah neighborhoods of Mosul, located some 400 kilometers north of the capital Baghdad.

A number of people were reportedly transferred to medical centers and hospitals after suffering severe poisoning with the toxic gas.

Noureddin Qablan, the Deputy Chief of the Nineveh Provincial Council, announced that a woman and her two children suffered skin burns and dyspnea after rockets laced with mustard gas slammed into Mosul's al-Samah and Northern Karaj neighborhoods.

Qablan added that the trio were transferred to a hospital in Erbil, the capital of Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdistan region, to receive medical treatment.

Separately, a local source, requesting anonymity, said Daesh's so-called director for religious affairs, his son and one of his close aides were killed during clashes with Iraqi security forces in Mosul’s western neighborhood of Wadi Hajar.

Meanwhile, two British medical students, who joined Daesh after studying medicine in the Sudanese capital city of Khartoum, were killed during a firefight in northern Iraq. 

Ahmed Sami Kheder and Hisham Fadlallah are reported to have been killed as they fled Mosul in a convoy at the weekend.

On February 19, Iraqi government troops and fighters from the Popular Mobilization Units – commonly known by the Arabic name Hashd al-Sha’abi – mounted a new offensive to liberate western Mosul.

ME