BAGHDAD, Feb. 22 — Insurgents are likely to continue combining car bombs with chlorine gas and other chemicals to launch attacks similar to three in recent weeks that spewed chlorine and sickened scores of Iraqis, the military warned Thursday.American troops raided a car-bomb factory near Falluja and found chlorine cylinders and propane tanks among the bomb components.
The raid late Tuesday in Karma, an insurgent-dominated village between Falluja and Baghdad, led American officials to suggest that insurgents had planned to combine the materials found into a new round of chemical-laden vehicular bombs.
The latest chlorine bombing happened Wednesday in southern Baghdad and killed at least two people and wounded 32 others. Many exhibited symptoms of exposure to chlorine, a greenish gas that burns the skin and can be fatal after a few concentrated, deep breaths.
The Karma site was stocked with “numerous artillery rounds, mortar rounds, bombs, rockets, gutted antiaircraft shells, a pickup truck and three other vehicles that were already in various stages of preparations as car bombs,” said Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, the second-ranking commander in Iraq.
“We also found ingredients to be used to devise or enhance explosives such as fertilizer and chlorine cylinders,” the general said.
The general insisted that the recent chlorine attacks did not suggest that the insurgency is “any more capable,” but said that militants were trying to “adapt in such ways where they can continue to create instability, and that’s what they’re doing.”
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