ERBIL, Iraq — Eleven-year old Yasir Hamid squinted as his uncle used gauze to clean the hair around his wound. “I’m ok, I’m ok,” he said, trying to force a smile from beneath the gray woolen blankets on his hospital bed. Five other members of his family lay and sat nearby, each bearing their own signs of what public health experts believe was the first chemical weapons attack during the campaign to retake Mosul from the Islamic State.
Doctors treating Yasir and his family in the northern Iraqi city of Erbil now believe that mustard gas was the chemical that filled their family room just under two weeks ago, burning the children’s skin so much it blistered and burst. The lesions go so deep that 10 days later, Yasir’s doctors still put him under full anesthesia to re-dress the wounds.
“The clinical signs indicated that this is most probably mustard gas,” said Dr. Johannes Schad, a German physician with the International Committee for the Red Cross who is now overseeing their care. “We don’t have lab results now back, and in that case we could finally confirm. But most probably it was mustard gas,” he told Devex.
About the author
Elizabeth Dickinson@dickinsonbeth
Elizabeth Dickinson is a former associate editor at Devex. Based in the Middle East, she has previously served as Gulf correspondent for The National, assistant managing editor at Foreign Policy, and Nigeria correspondent at The Economist. Her writing also appeared in The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Politico Magazine, and Newsweek, among others.